I have taken enough writing courses in my life to know the dynamics of a properly set up story. I’ll be honest, in college I couldn’t stand reading most of what my classmates wrote. I struggled to pay attention. The problem was that we were peer editing for the most part so I had to come up with something constructive and positive to say about their work. It bored me though. I couldn’t see how they could take my work and have so much to say about it when. Yet it’d never fail. They’d give me back the copies of my stories and essays with the margins and back pages filled with notes and questions. The harder the comments were to read the better the advice and thoughts would be. It seems the students with less going on in their heads were the ones with the neatest hand writing. I think that is because people of genius typically think faster and with far greater complexity than their hands can keep up.
Anyway, I bring up my college past because of the constant insistence of theirs that I had to begin all of my stories in medias res. This is the technique where you start your story in the middle of some action to hook your readers. It’s like dangling bait and hoping someone will bite and hold fast. I’m not disagreeing with this idea. But in the context of this story I think it is important to explain a dilemma that I encountered with this technique. I know I’ve already broken the 4th wall, but I’m not a professional writer so luckily no guild will come after me and turn me into a toad who can only write limericks and hopefully you will forgive me as well.
The first time I wrote this story, I began it like I do many of my stories. I began at the end. Well, near the end; I usually start stories very close to the end and then jump back to the beginning and work my way once again to the end. That has a name too, a hyperbole. But the start (or the end) was too dramatic. Too much of anything is a bad thing. I recognized it immediately. I would have scrapped the whole thing if not for my friend.
You see the story was about him. He's not so old, but he's already retired from two professions. I met him in
I started up a conversation with him not knowing that he owned the place. I talked about my Japanese girl friend and how much I liked magaru (tuna). His English was pretty good, and he gave me some extra sashimi because I was a good conversationalist in his opinion. We worked out a reward system, I brought him photos for him to hang in his shop and he'd make sure I got the freshest fish, the biggest rolls, and as much nigorishi as I wanted. He found out that I was a writer of sorts and he got all excited one evening.
"Matto kun," he said to me, "I have gooood story."
"Everyone has a good story," I told him, "That's why all life is beautiful."
"Hai, wakata, but this is a goooood story. You might find it hard to believe it."
"Oh? It's a true story?"
"Hai, souda. It is my story."
"Your story?" I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my moleskin notebook.
"She said to me, 'This is how the world ends.'"
"Who said that?"
"I am sorry. I am not good at the order. Please just let me tell you my story. Then you can write."
I put my pen down. "Hai."
***
(These were his words, but now they're mine)~
***
“This is how the world ends,” she whispered in my ear. The night seemed to be moving so fast. It was almost as if the Earth herself was moving through dark space against a star-field. But the paradox was that morning was never closer.
We’re nestled in a niche in a rock. The niche was created by a mortar from a French battleship during the Napoleonic wars. The ship being fired upon was called La Bastion, but the sailors called it le fantôme because legend has it that it once sailed through an attack fleet of sixty frigates and destroyers without being seen. Unfortunately, at the time this mortar struck this rock, le fantôme’s supernatural power seemed to be at an end. While this one shell missed, a dozen did not. But the mystique was not all lost. No wreckage ever washed ashore, no bodies, nothing. Divers for years have searched the waters, but still the only evidence of le fantôme’s demise is this crater, now worn smooth by time and wind like a porcelain cup for poached eggs. It’s like it simply stopped existing.
The fire glowed; crimson embers alive and waiting to be fed. I stretched my hand above me; it was silhouetted against a million stars that are only visible miles away from the pollution of man-made light.
“This is how the world ends,” she whispered like a soft sigh. She rested her head against my chest, her hand at my collar bone. She listened to my heart. She always does. She says if you can listen hard enough you can memorize the rhythm and match it. I’m glad she knows how to do it because I’ve never had the talent.
---
I’ve had an irregular heart beat since I was little. It shocked my doctor when I was three. He sat there listening and listening and then he told my mother that I had to have an echo-cardiogram.
Sometimes it beat with a perfectly normal rhythm. Other times it was like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation at Shinjuku station during the evening rush. But the doctors couldn’t find a tell tale hole or damaged valve. I had a perfectly normal healthy heart that sometimes beat erratically. The doctors studied me for many years until I turned twenty. By then I was tired of tests with no results and I was making my own appointments I simply told the doctors that I was done.
I graduated from college, took a job as a graphic designer for a mid-level advertising firm in Roppongi, and quietly went about my life. I worked hard and made good money.
I had three big goals in my life. Only three: I wanted to write a book about a man whose heart stops when he is with the woman he loves. I wanted to publish a picture book of my own artwork to decorate the tables of five-star hotels. The last was a secret that I never told anyone. I wanted to release my own album of traditional Japanese music played with the cello.
I never had touched a musical instrument before. I wasn’t a good singer, but I liked to sing. I couldn’t read music. But I knew that I’d someday play the cello and play it famously. In secret I collected cello music from all over the world, just cello though, nothing in an orchestra or with accompanying music. I built up quiet a collection over the years. After work I’d go to it, hidden in my closet behind my coats like some of my friends hid their porn and I’d sit on a cushion on my bedroom floor and listen in private while drinking beer or smoking Seven Star cigarettes.
---
I met Yuki at the hospital. Her appendix had burst and she had to have emergency surgery. She spent three weeks in the hospital. This day she was back on a follow up appointment, recovering quite well it seemed. I was there because of my heart of course; three times a day for the past three days it would beat out of control. It felt like my ribs would crack and burst from the pressure. It started at breakfast on Monday. I was sitting at my table eating rice with salmon and miso soup with shellfish, when all of a sudden I felt a thud. It was so loud I jumped in surprise and almost dropped my rice. There was silence. Then there was a second thud. The third thud came in half the time the second one took. This pattern continued like an old steam engine building up speed. I clutched my chest. I could feel nothing with my hand, but within my ribs it felt like my heart would surely break free of its bone cage. I rushed to the bathroom unsure of what to do. I wanted to look at myself in the mirror and reassure myself I was still there I guess. By the time I got there though it stopped. As suddenly as it had started it was gone.
At lunch that day the same thing happened. I was out eating with one of my co-workers at a little udon shop. This time I gripped the table with both my hands, my knuckles turning white.
“Hikari-san?” Asuka, another graphic artists, looked at me a little frightened.
As soon as he spoke it stopped. I gasped for air and then shook my head unable to say anything.
“Your heart?”
I nod.
“We should get you to the doctor.”
I shake my head stubbornly. “No thank you. It’s nothing I’m sure of it.”
Three days later I capitulated. I saw my usual doctor. We took sonograms, xrays, blood samples, MRI. It was like I was taking memorized steps in an ancient ritualized dance.
Yuki and I waited in the small waiting room. She showed me her stitches when I asked her why she was there.
I went back two more times for follow up appointments. Each time Yuki was there in the waiting room when I arrived and gone when I was finished.
The second visit we smiled at each other. That was when she showed me her stitches. I let her feel my pulse, but it was beating perfectly normally at that time. She wanted to feel it anyway though, she was a funny girl.
The third visit we talked about fish. A river runs in front of her parent’s house. She tells me I should come feed Shogun sometime. Shogun is the white koi that lives in her river trapped by a damn upstream and shallows downstream. Every tsunami makes Yuki worry that Shogun will be swept downstream away from his home. He brings good luck, she told me. She swears that if you can see him at night ever, that he’ll grant wishes beneath the moonlight. She quickly adds that you can only seem him at night when the moon is full.
The nurse came in the middle of your conversation of full moons and magic koi and said to me, “Mr. Yasumato, the doctor will see you now.”
Yuki laughed and she said that she’d see me next week and good luck.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but this is my last appointment for now. I have no more tests.”
She looked disappointed. I half turned towards the nurse, but then faced Yuki again. “I’m sorry, but would you like to go get a drink? I mean if you don’t have anything else to do. I mean, I will wait for you after my appointment. We can go to Omoru, it is near here and I know the owner.” I shut my mouth because I was talking too much. I was too nervous. My heart was making odd clicking noises. They seemed so loud, I was afraid that everyone could hear it.
She smiled though; she said that it sounded wonderful. The nurse waited patiently.
“Good, great! Ok. I’ll wait here I said.” I turned quickly and went with the nurse. My heart was like a runaway horse that has thrown his rider and was making for open plains and spacious pastures.
I went into the small room and sat on the table. I took off my shirt and waited for the doctor. I tried whistling, but I can only whistle like a tea kettle and it even sounds annoying to me.
The doctor came in and asked how I was.
“Taijobu,” I said with a smile. And it was true. I felt fine, better than fine.
He pressed his stethoscope against my chest. “Breathe in,” he instructed. He frowned. “Breathe in,” he repeated. He frowned again.
“What is it?”
He scratched the back of his hand, “Well,” he started, “your heart is not beating.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there is no heart beat. It’s like you forgot to bring your heart today.”
That was a funny thing for a doctor to say. I frowned. “Seriously?” I stopped. Stilled myself, I couldn’t feel it beating either, but then who can feel their heart beat when it’s beating calmly?
He grabbed my wrist, “I can feel your pulse.” He blew into his stethoscope, “Stethoscope seems fine.” He tried my chest again. “Nothing.”
My doctor opened the door, “Kutchiki-san,” he called for his nurse. She came quickly. “Let me borrow your stethoscope,” he said. She handed him the instrument she had a bright pink one. The new stethoscope was pressed against my chest, then my back. He opened the door again, “Kyoshota-san,” he called for the other doctor. The second doctor appeared, walking with an open manila folder. He shut it when he came into the room and bowed.
“Hai? Doshta?” Dr. Kyoshota asked.
“May I borrow your stethoscope?”
“Hai.”
This stethoscope was black. “Ahhh,” my doctor said. My heartbeat was finally found.
“What color was your doctor’s stethoscope?” Yuki asked as we drank Asahi beer and smoked a cigarette at Omoru.
“I don’t remember,” I told her. “Blue maybe.”
Yuki was a photographer when she needed money. She had graduated from a
She had a habit of wearing muted colors that made her blend in with her surroundings somewhat startlingly. It was almost like she was a chameleon in a sense. When I first met her we were the only two patients waiting at the doctor’s office. If there had been one other person it’s very likely I wouldn’t have even seen her.
She had a funny way of talking. You’d almost miss the fact that she was talking at all, it was like background noise in some elegant restaurant. Everything about her seemed to help her just fade into the world; everything, except her questions.
Her questions were always quiet and subtle, much like her ordinary speech. There was only the slightest upward inflection that let you in on the fact that it was a question. But, she hardly ever asked questions and each one was like a shooting star; gone in a blink but you still reach out hoping to grasp the flaming tail.
We quietly saw each other for a couple months. I hadn’t had a serious girlfriend since college. That had ended badly and I wasn’t interested in another experience like that again. At that time I had been a virgin. We slept together on my 20th birthday and after that for some reason I didn’t feel anything towards her. It was like all the feelings I had for her exploded that night and afterwards there was nothing I could do to bring them back. I felt truly horrible about it. She was a great girl from a nice family. She went to a nice girl’s college in
I don’t know if that was true or one last ditched attempt to push me further into self-loathing, but after that I held no interest in the opposite sex. Occasionally I would meet a girl at a bar and if things went well we’d go to a love hotel and in the morning we’d have hangovers. Usually the girls said nothing to me, they would just get dressed and leave. Occasionally, they’d be angry, like I tricked them into having sex. Even rarer they’d try to give me their numbers so we could get together again. I never called them. It’s not like I did that a lot. I wasn’t some maniac. If I couldn’t stand the urges of my instincts I’d just masturbate. I never ever went out looking to score.
If Yuki was a virgin I didn’t know. I never asked. We enjoyed each other’s company. We’d have long walks talking about art and eat at restaurants that we helped promote. It was more of a deep friendship, than a relationship, but I stopped going out to bars. When I felt desire I’d masturbate or try to suppress it. I was respectful as I could be. I was sure to make the last train home at least when I visited her apartment. When she came to mine I would call a taxi for her.
She liked being held. I think I liked holding her as much as she liked being held. She’d snuggle down against me, close her eyes. She’d murmur softly sometimes, like she was talking to herself.
It was a day in September when she asked me the first question I couldn’t answer.
“Why does your heart sing?”
“What?” I had no idea what she meant.
“Your heart,” she pressed her head against my chest. We were sitting on a park bench wearing black wool coats with our hands jammed in the pockets. “Why does your heart sing?” Yuki repeated.
“You know I have an irregular heartbeat.”
“No you don’t. Have you ever listened to it?”
“No,” I admitted. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it sang.”
“Why does no one ever listen to their own heart?”
I smiled.
We sat there for a long time. She tapped out my heart’s song with her finger on my stomach.
The second question came three months later. This was even more abstract than the first. “How will the world end?”
It was just the kind of question that impossible to answer and she asked me while I was in the middle of a difficult Murakami short story. One of those short stories that ended before I could understand it.
I just looked at her with a stupid face, because when people ask you a question that you have no answer for you freeze, put on a stupid face, and make throat noises to fill up the silence.
Yuki was sitting at the table. Her laptop was open and she was scrolling through the photographs she had taken at a small fashion show in east
She was just sitting there scrolling through her pictures. She would stop occasionally and jot down a photo number. Sometimes I’d find these little lists lying around my apartment.
0015
0032
0080
0124…..
Finally I managed a, “What?” like I didn’t hear her the first time.
She stopped, wrote down a number, “How do you think the world will end?”
“I don’t know, maybe war, nuclear fallout, disaster, global warming, plague, asteroid.”
She shook her head in a manner that said I was misunderstanding. “I mean, what do you think will end the world?”
“I don’t see the difference.”
She frowned. “Never mind, why I can’t find the right words?” She resigned herself to scrolling through her pictures again.
“I’m sorry.” I was quiet for a while.”
“What do you think will end the world?”
She straightened up. I waited until I started considering making a second round of throaty noises. Finally she said, “I’m not sure. Sometimes I think it already has. Or maybe we doomed ourselves after we started using electricity or steam power. If you think about it, everything that starts will end. I guess the beginning is also the beginning of the end. Maybe the world has already ended.” She nodded to my book. “It’s like how Murakami writes. You always tell me you can’t understand the ending, maybe it’s not that you can’t understand it, but you missed it. Maybe we just don’t notice.” She frowned a little bit searching for words. “I don’t know how to put it. I guess I was just wondering why things end, that’s all.”
It was rare for her to say so much at one time. I took my time to think over all of what she had said. Finally I said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think that if the world will end then we’d realize it when happened. I don’t think the world has ended quite yet.”
She turned away from her laptop and smiled. “Yes, I suppose so. We’ll just know.”
The third question I suppose could be seen as the beginning of the end. It was like the first drops of the tsunami, the small leak in the damn. We were making nabe. I was cutting enoki and cabbage. Yuki stirred the soup, added more tofu and fugu.
“Egg?” she asked me. I shook my head. She cracked a raw egg into her own bowl. “Do we have more noodles?”
“Hai. They’re below nori.”
We were quiet for a while, I really enjoyed this time we spent. My heart had not had any flare ups since my last round of tests, even though Yuki claimed to be able to hear it sing. I asked her what kind of music it was, “Is it jazz?” I teased. She laughed and said no, but if it were jazz then it truly explain why doctors labeled it erratic.
We had a quiet way as a couple. I hadn’t even told her about my cello collection, though the more time I spent with her, the less time I spent locked in my room alone listening to cello.
Yuki squeezed a cut lime into my bowl. “Do you want to make love?”
I stopped cutting the mushrooms and cabbage.
She looked at me as she broke the yoke of her egg with her chopsticks and scrambled it.
“Of course I want to. Do you?”
“Yes.”
We ate the soup without really saying much. I thought for a long time. Then I couldn’t think anymore. So I thought of nothing. And when I couldn’t think of nothing anymore I sat in silence. There it was. A rhythm. A soft thump in my chest. Nothing could be clearer. There it was again. And again. So we sat there, when the soup got low we added more vegetables, or more tofu, or fugu, or pork. I sat there and listened to my heart. It beat very slowly. Like a drummer on a sad slow march.
After dinner Yuki says we should go on a trip; as if the question before dinner has all but been forgotten. So we talked about where we wanted to go. But the original question was still there. Like something waiting beneath the surface of an unknown liquid. You can’t just reach in and grab it.
She wanted to go to
I nodded, took out a cigarette.
“Where do you want to go?”
Traveling wasn’t something I loved. I was very fond of Japanese food, and traveling would present a problem with my eating habits. I thought for a while. It’s not that I haven’t traveled. In college I went on one trip to
“I wanted to go to
She raised her eyebrows; I’ve already been to
“I don’t know. I want to go again, someday.
Yuki smiled and took my cigarette away from me. She took a slow drag and said that we should go to
I read about the death of La Bastion at a fort on
When we got to
The third day around eleven we pulled into a little cove. The clear azure water was surrounded by tall stone cliffs twenty meters high and there was no wind. I froze. This was it. The picture from the painting! I jumped up excited.
“This is it!”
“What is it?” Yuki asked me, putting her camera down.
“This is the scene from the painting.”
The guide had a puzzled look on his face, but Yuki explained to him. Her English was far better than mine, probably better than our guide’s too.
The guide’s face lit up. “Yes, yes, this is where a battle took place. The English navy caught a small French destroyer here.” He pointed up at the high rocks. “There is a place up there where a mortar exploded and killed a small boy who was watching the battle. A legend says that the father came and found his son’s body, but couldn’t find his soul. The explosion had blown the two apart. The father searched the entire island for it, but he couldn’t find it. Finally, an old priest told the grieving parent the soul had been buried into the stone. So the father chiseled away at the cavity in the stone. He was meticulous because he didn’t want to damage the soul. He went in a circular pattern as suggested by the priest until he finally found his son’s soul.”
Yuki translates most of this for me so I can understand it entirely.
The guide continues, “The spot is now smooth because of the rain and wind and time. It’s is a perfect cup.” He cups his hands to emphasize his point.
“Can we land? Can I see this?”
“There is a small inn on this island. There aren’t many tourists that actually stay here, but if you’d like I can drop you off on the other side and pick you up tomorrow.”
We disembark on a small noncommercial dock. The guide waves goodbye to us and motors away. The inn is small, we’re the only customers and they don’t speak much English and of course absolutely no Japanese. We leave the confused innkeepers after paying for what we hope is only a single night’s stay and find a small shop that sells a little bit of everything. I buy a blanket, a torch, some extra batteries, some sandwiches and water. I put everything into my knapsack which is mostly empty anyway save for a map of the islands. Before we leave Yuki buys a compass and puts it in my bag as well.
It really is a tiny island. Yuki somehow manages to find a taxi and it only takes us an hour to get to the other side of the island. The paved road ends and becomes gravel. After sometime the gravel ends as well. We get out after the gravel road starts to turn north. The driver doesn’t speak much English. We try to convey that we want him to come back at dusk, but I don’t think we make much of an impression. He roars off in a swirl of dust waving.
It’s an hour hike to the coast line. The water is far below. After an hour of searching I find the crater. It’s true, it’s smooth. I climb in. Yuki takes a picture of me. There a thin layer of dirt at the bottom. I scoop it out until it’s just an empty rock cup. I wet a handkerchief with some of the water we brought with us and clean the stone as much as I can. After close inspection I see that there are cracks in the bottom of the crater where the water probably runs off. I look down and imagine I’m the boy watching a fierce naval battle. Yuki stands looking at the ocean taking some pictures. The wind up here is strong. Her hair whips around wildly. I call to her and she slips down into the crater with me. I hold her and let my mind wander. We share one of the sandwiches.
As the sun starts to sink I figure it’s about time to head back to road. “Let’s head back.” I tell Yuki. She doesn’t move, she just grips me tightly and is frozen, like she can’t move. I caress her hair and kiss her cheek. This is the first time I’ve kissed her. She looks up at me, still tightly clutching my shirt. Her head moves up and I draw her close and kiss her on the lips. Slowly she releases me. Her hands move and she unbuttons her shirt. We don’t say a word. There is nothing to be said. There is nothing more natural than this. Nothing exists anymore; not the lost wreckage of a French destroyer, not the little inn on the other side of the island, not the wind, not the water. As one person we exist and I realize I love her. I love her. I love her. And she loves me. If only for an instant, in that moment. I can see it in her eye. The way she draws me into her. The way she holds me as we move together.
Afterwards, I hold her; we’re wrapped in the blanket I bought. She shivers a little, I hold her tighter.
“This is how the world ends.” Yuki says. It sounds funny, like I’m listening to her speak from behind a curtain. I build a little fire from the dead wood I was able to find and we share a cigarette.
***
Hikari stops.
“So what happened?” I ask him. It’s late now. The
“We fell asleep.”
“And?”
“When I woke up she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Hai.”
“Where did she go?”
He shakes his head and runs his hand through his salt and pepper hair. “Wakatanai.”
“HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW?”
It looks like he might cry a little or like he is thinking of a time that he cried a lot. “I woke up and she was gone. I looked all over the cliffs, but she wasn’t there. I went back to the inn and she was not there.”
“People don’t just disappear.”
“Yes they do. Sometimes they do.”
“Did you search the island?”
“Yes, I looked everywhere, I became obsessed.”
I lower my voice, “Is it possible she jumped?”
He shakes his head, “I don’t know, yes I suppose. No body was ever found. The police searched, the military helped a little, and it was in the Japanese news for quite a while. She just was gone.”
“That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. How about your heart?”
He shakes his head, “My heart is absolutely 100% normal now.”
“That’s good, I used to have a heart murmur.”
He shakes his head again, “There was one moment that it beat wildly again. When I visited that same crater some years later. It beat uncontrollably.”
“What happened?”
“I danced.”
“Danced?”
“Yes, I danced to the rhythm of my heart song. I took off all of clothes and there on the stone cliffs I danced.”
“Wow.”
He nodded. “I thought about jumping from the cliffs, but they aren’t so high that I’d die probably, and I still hoped that someday I’d find her again or that she’d find me. But in that moment I was my happiest, well the happiest I could be while being the saddest person on the Earth. It was as if in that moment, with my heart beating wildly like that I could feel her again. It was as if my heart was singing out, ‘This song! This is the song that is forever yours!’ So I danced and thought about Shogun, the white koi who granted wishes.”
He looks at me and says, “You know who I thought about then?”
I shake my head.
“My first girlfriend, or rather the child from that abortion.”
“Do you really think that she had an abortion?”
Hikari nods. “I’ve named that child right there, the child who was never a child. I thought of the father who dug away at stone to try to find his precious child’s soul that had been lost.”
“What did you name him?”
“I’m sorry,” Hikari said, “I have never told anyone his name.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“No it’s ok.”
I put on my jacket. It’s late. I want to get home to write everything down before I forget anything. I pause at the door though. “Hikari-san.”
“Hai?”
“What about your three dreams?”
He smiles. “I’ve never written a book and I’ve never published a coffee book.”
“What about the cello?”
He shakes his head. “I got rid of my cello collection years ago. Pretty sad eh? I didn’t accomplish anything.”
On the trolley, heading home it hits me. I smile and then the tears come. It's like all the water in my body wants to escape. The only people on the trolley with me are some college kids heading back to
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