Hardboiled: & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto & Michael Emmerich

Author:Banana Yoshimoto & Michael Emmerich [Yoshimoto, Banana & Emmerich, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780802117991
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2001-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

6

Another Dream

The dream was very real.

I couldn’t even say for sure whether it was a dream or a memory. Though I had the feeling it had actually happened. The dream was extremely short.

I was there, in Chizuru’s apartment. In a room that no longer exists.

Everything was so clear; I could even see the stains on the high ceiling.

I saw light glinting off the beautifully polished, stainless steel kitchen counter.

It was foggy outside. So foggy I almost thought it would come inside.

The sky glowed dully and the noise of the traffic was muted.

I could hear the sounds of the couple overhead ardently creating another child in the bathroom, as if they didn’t have enough already.

“God, they’re so loud!” I moaned. “Don’t they know how late it is?”

I was flipping through a magazine; my mind was blank.

Recently, I had become something of an alcoholic; I was almost finished with a two-liter bottle of sake I had been drinking, little by little, and I was very drunk.

“I know, why don’t I put on some music?” said Chizuru.

Since she didn’t sleep at night, she loved it when I tried to stay up late.

She looked so happy. Just like a child.

Chizuru put on a random CD. It was rather loud, but it still sounded muffled, as if the sound were being absorbed by the fog.

The couple upstairs carried on undisturbed, having such a wild time that every so often we would hear great splashes of water or a big crash as they knocked over the washbasin, or sometimes, in the midst of it all, started discussing their children’s education. Everything was so clearly audible that I began to suspect they were doing it with the bathroom window wide open.

“It’s amazing. They sure have a lot of stamina...” I said.

To my drunken eyes, Chizuru looked kind of transparent. Maybe it was the color of her skin, or maybe it was the fog, or maybe it was just the sort of person she was. It occurred to me that we might not have much longer together.

For some reason, it seemed natural that a creature like her, who didn’t sleep at night and hardly ate a thing, wouldn’t live very long.

“Personally, I don’t really mind,” said Chizuru. She smiled as she listened, entranced, to the mixture of the music and the noises upstairs. “Hearing people makes me feel safe. I don’t know, for me, it’s kind of a mom-and-dad sound.”

“There’s a bit too much of the mom-and-dad aspect, don’t you think?” I said. “I wouldn’t mind if they chose a slightly milder way of expressing it.”

Chizuru laughed. “I don’t agree. 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.”

I didn’t matter either way. I was much more interested in looking at Chizuru sitting there by the window, the fog and the glow from the headlights at her back.

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