The space that cannot be filled, no matter how cheerfully a child and an old person are living together—the deathly silence that, panting in a corner of the room, pushes its way in like a shudder. I felt it very early, although no one told me about it.
I think Yuichi did, too.
When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own. Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time. I've always lived with that knowledge rooted in my being: perhaps that's why Yuichi's way of reacting to things seemed natural to me.
An irresistible shift had put the past behind me. I had recoiled in a daze; all I could do was react weakly. But it was not I who was doing the shifting—on the contrary. For me everything had been agony.
Never again. I don't care for the loaded sentimentality of those words or for the feeling of limitation they impose. But just then they struck me with an unforgettable intensity and authority. I intended to think them over dispassionately.
I was surprised. Am I losing my mind? I wondered. It was like being falling-down drunk: my body was independent of me. Before I knew it, tears were flooding out. I felt myself turning bright red with embarrassment and got off the bus. I watched it drive away, and then without thinking I ducked into a poorly lit alley.
Jammed between my own bags, stooped over, I sobbed. I had never cried this way in my life. As the hot tears poured out, I remembered that I had never had a proper cry over my grandmother's death. I had a feeling that I wasn't crying over any one sad thing, but rather for many.
I was puzzled, smiling about how I had just gone from the darkest despair to feeling wonderful. I stood up, smoothed down my skirt, and started back for the Tanabes'.
While what had happened was utterly amazing, it didn't seem so out of the ordinary, really. It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.
I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.
"Because I have a lot of faith in you, I suddenly feel I ought to tell you something. I learned it raising Yuichi. There were many, many difficult times, god knows. If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something. It could be children, or it could be house plants, you know? By doing that you come to understand your own limitations. That's where it starts." As if chanting a liturgy, she related to me her philosophy of life.
"Life can be so hard," I said, moved.
"Yes. But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it."
Her hair rustled, brushing her shoulders. There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can't bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.
As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.
As I walked along under the starry sky, my keys jingling, the tears began to flow one after the other. The street, my footsteps, the quiet buildings, everything seemed warped. My breath became painfully blocked; I felt like I was choking. My eyes were stung by the lashing wind, and I began to feel colder and colder.
Things that my eyes normally take in — telephone poles, street lights, parked cars, the black sky — I could now barely make out. There was a strange beauty to their distortion. Everything came zooming in at me. I felt powerless to stop the energy from rushing out of my body; it seemed to dissipate with a hissing sound into the darkness.
When my parents died I was still a child. When my grandfather died, I had a boyfriend. When my grandmother died I was left all alone. But never had I felt so alone as I did now.
From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a gloomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.
I wanted it to end, and quickly, but for now I would go see Yuichi. Hear everything he had to say, in detail. But what good would that do? What could come of it? It was not a question of hoping for anything. It would mean being flooded with an even more gigantic despair.
I looked intently at his face, so beaten down by it all, and this is what came out of my mouth: "For some reason there's always death around us. My parents, my grandfather, my grandmother . . . your real mother, even Eriko. My god—in this gigantic universe there can't be a pair like us. The fact that we're friends is amazing. All this death. . . all this death."
"Really." Yuichi smiled. "Maybe we should go into business. Our clients could pay us to move in with people they want dead. We'll call ourselves destruction workers." His sadly cheerful face radiated a dim glow. We moved deeper into the dead of night. I turned around to look out the window at the flickering lights below. The city was fringed with tiny points of brightness, and the lines of cars were like a phosphorescent river flowing through the darkness.
"So I've become an orphan," said Yuichi.
"That goes double for me. Not that I'm bragging about it," I said, laughing, and suddenly tears began to stream down Yuichi's cheeks.
"I really needed you to make me laugh," he said, rubbing his eyes with his arm, "so much I couldn't stand it anymore."
I reached out and took his face in both hands. "Thank you for calling me," I said softly.
Yes, Yuichi, in this world there are all kinds of people. There are people who choose to live their lives in filth; this is hard for me to understand. People who purposely do abhorrent things, just for the attention it draws to them, until they themselves are trapped. I cannot understand it, and no matter how much they suffer I cannot feel pity for them.
I heard the door close, and when I was alone I realized I was dead tired. The room was so unearthly quiet, I lost all sense of time being divided into seconds. I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop.
Houses always feel like that after someone has died.
I sank into the sofa and stared blankly at the melancholy early-winter gray outside the large window. The heavy, cold air of winter permeated every part of this little neighborhood—the park, the walkways—like a fog. I couldn't bear it. It oppressed me, and I felt like I couldn't breathe.
Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko's was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed.
I flopped down on my back and looked up at the dear, familiar ceiling. Right after my grandmother died, I had stared at this same ceiling many an afternoon while Yuichi and Eriko were out. I remember thinking to myself, my grandmother is dead, I've lost my last blood relation, and things can't get any worse. But now they had. Eriko been enormously important to me. In the six months spent together she had always been there for me; she spoiled me.
To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.
My heart was so heavy now because of just that. I watched the gloomy clouds and the orange of the sunset spreading across them in the western sky. Soon the cold night would descend and fill the hollow in my heart. I felt sleepy but said to myself, if you sleep now, you'll have bad dreams. So I got up.
After a long absence I was once again in the Tanabe kitchen. For an instant I had a vision of Eriko's smiling face, and my heart turned over. I felt an urge to get moving. It looked to me like the kitchen had not been used in quite a while. It was somewhat dirty and dark. I began to clean. I scrubbed the sink with scouring powder, wiped off the burners, washed the dishes, sharpened the knives. I washed and bleached all the dish towels, and while watching them go round and round in the dryer I realized that I had become calmer. Why do I love everything that has to do with kitchens so much? It's strange. Perhaps because to me a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul. As I stood there, I seemed to be making a new start; something was coming back.
Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by "their happiness" is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing. Dressed in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. I think that's great. I wouldn't mind that kind of life. Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life—my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing.
I was not afraid of burns or scars; I didn't suffer from sleepless nights. Every day I thrilled with pleasure at the challenges tomorrow would bring. Memorizing the recipe, I would make carrot cakes that included a bit of my soul. At the supermarket I would stare at a bright red tomato, loving it for dear life. Having known such joy, there was no going back. attend the classes, it made sense. Their attitude was completely different from mine.
But—that one summer of bliss. In that kitchen.
No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. This is what makes the life I have now possible.
Inching one's way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can't take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that.
For me, Eriko's death was still a distant event. I couldn't deal with it head-on. Faced with a tempest of shock, I could only approach the dark fact of her death little by little. And Yuichi—Yuichi was like a willow beaten down by the driving rain.
So even though it was now just the two of us, we avoided talking about Eriko's death, and that omission loomed larger and larger in time and space. But for the time being, "just the two of us" was a warm, safe place where the future was on hold. And yet there was—how should I put this?—a huge, terrifying premonition that those unpaid bills would inexorably come due. The enormity of it only heightened our feeling of being orphans alone in the dark.
Oddly, his sincerity touched me most of all. He continued, "Right now I can't think. What do you mean in my life? How am I myself changing? How will my life be different from before? I don't have a clue about any of that. I try to think about it, but with the kind of worthless thoughts I'm having in the state I'm in, I can't decide anything. I've got to pull myself out of it soon. Now I've got you tangled up in it. The two of us may be in the epicenter of death, but I was hoping to spare you this misery. It could be like this for as long as we stay together."
"Yuichi, don't think like that. Let's see what happens," I said, on the verge of tears.
"Right. I won't remember any of this tomorrow. It's always like that. No day has any connection to the one before."
The apartment had taken on the silence of the dead of night and seemed as though it were listening to Yuichi's voice. It was lost without Eriko. The feeling bore down heavier as the night deepened. It made me feel that nothing could be shared.
Yuichi and I are climbing a narrow ladder in the jet-black gloom. Together we peer into the cauldron of hell. We stare into the bubbling red sea of fire, and the air hitting our faces is so hot it makes us reel. Even though we're standing side by side, even though we're closer to each other than to anyone else in the world, even though we're friends forever, we don't join hands. No matter how forlorn we are, we each insist on standing on our own two feet. But I wonder, as I look at his uneasy profde blazingly illuminated by the hellish fire, although we have always acted like brother and sister, aren't we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don't we think of each other that way? But the place we are in now is just too dreadful. It is not a place where two people can create a life together,
Although I had been earnestly daydreaming until then, I suddenly started to laugh. "I see two lovers looking over the edge of the cauldron of hell. Are they contemplating a double suicide? This means their love will end in hell." I couldn't stop laughing.
"I'm not insensitive," I said. "I know what it's like to lose someone. But this isn't the place to talk about it. If you have anything more to say ..." I was about to tell her to call me at home, but instead I ended up blurting out, " . . . or perhaps you'd like me to sob hysterically and chase you with a kitchen knife?" I admit that it was rather cold-blooded of me. She gave me an evil scowl and said in a chilly voice, "I've said all I had to say. Excuse me." Those were her parting words. With the click, click of her little beige pumps, she turned and walked to the door. Then, slamming it with a bang, she was gone.
It was over, leaving behind the bitter aftertaste of a confrontation in which nothing was gained.
In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one's life history is etched in the senses. And things of no particular importance, or irreplaceable things, can suddenly resurface in a café one winter night.
"It does, doesn't it? If. . ." I wanted to say, "If there's anything I can do, just say so," but I stopped myself. I silendy implored: May the memory of this moment, here, the glowing impression of the two of us facing each other in this warm, bright place, drinking lovely hot tea, help save him, even a little bit.
Inexplicably, my seatbelt seemed too tight. I realized with amazement—oh! This must be jealousy. Like children when they first learn why people say "ouch," this was my first experience of it. Now that Eriko was dead, the two of us, alone, were flowing down that river of light, suspended in the cosmic darkness, and were approaching a critical juncture.
I understood. I understood it from the color of the sky, the shape of the moon, the blackness of the night sky under which we passed. The building lights, the streetlights, were unforgiving.
"My wife said one day, 'How I'd love to have some living thing in this room. . . .' Living things were connected to the sun; I thought, a plant, yes, a plant. She urged me to get a big potted plant, one that didn't require much care. I raced to the flower shop, overjoyed that there was something I could give her. A typical male, at that time I didn't know benjamin from saintpaulia. I only knew I didn't want a cactus, so I bought her a pineapple plant. It was a plant I could understand; it had little fruit growing on it and everything. When I carried it into the sickroom she looked delighted and thanked me again and again.
"She was getting closer and closer to the end. One evening, three days before she went into a coma, she said to me, just as I was leaving, 'Please take the pineapple home.' To look at her she didn't seem worse than usual. Naturally we hadn't told her she had cancer, but it was as if she knew, as if she were whispering her last wishes. I was surprised and said, 'Why? I can see that it's withering, but wouldn't you rather have it?' But she begged me, in tears, to take it home, this sunny plant from a southern place, before it became infused with death. I had no choice. I took it in my arms.
"Because I was crying my eyes out, I couldn't take a taxi. It was colder than hell, too. That may have been the first time it occurred to me I didn't like being a man. When I calmed down somewhat, after walking as far as the station and having a drink in a little bar, I took the train. That night the freezing wind whisded through the apartment. With no one there, it could hardly have been called a home. I trembled, holding the pineapple tight against my chest. The sharp leaves stuck my cheeks. In this world, tonight, only the pineapple and I understand each other—that thought came straight from my heart. Closing my eyes, as if against the cold wind, I felt we were the only two living things sharing that loneliness. My wife, who understood me better than anyone, was by now—more than I, more than the pineapple—on intimate terms with death.
"Soon after that she died, and the pineapple withered, too. I didn't know how to care for plants and had overwa- tered it, you see. I stuck it out in a comer of the yard, and although I couldn't have put it into words, I came to understand something. If I try to say what it is now, it's very simple: I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me.
It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman, and here I am."
I understood what she was trying to say, and I remember thinking, listlessly, is this what it means to be happy? But now I feel it in my gut. Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated—defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Still, to cease living is unacceptable.
Tonight, again, I felt the darkness hindering my breathing. In my heavy, depressed sleep, I battled each demon in turn.
I felt I understood Yuichi's feelings as if I held them in my own two hands. Like me, but a hundred times more so, he had to get far away somewhere. He wanted to be alone, someplace where he wouldn't have to think about any- thing. To escape from it all, including me. Maybe he was even thinking of not coming back for some time. I was sure of it.
At that moment I had a thrillingly sharp intuition. I knew it as if I held it in my hands: In the gloom of death that surrounded the two of us, we were just at the point of approaching and negotiating a gentle curve. If we bypassed it, we would split off into different directions. In that case we would forever remain just friends.
I knew it. I knew it with absolute certainty.
I was at a loss as to what to do. And after all it would be okay to ask.
"When are you coming back?"
After a silence Yuichi said, "Very soon."
He's a bad liar: I was sure he would stay there as long as his money held out. This was the same Yuichi who had delayed telling me about Eriko's death and kept his depression to himself. That was his nature.
People aren't overcome by situations or outside forces; defeat invades from within, I thought. I had lost my last ounce of strength. Before my eyes something was coming to an end, something I didn't want to end, but for which I lacked the energy to suffer, much less fight. There was only a leaden hopelessness in me.
Maybe someday I'd be able to think it over calmly, in a brighter place than this, full of sunlight and flowers. But by then it would be too late.
We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it's more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did—but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don't mean this in the fatalistic sense; we're constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct.
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.
As a counselor once told me - a counselor for Disaffected Yought, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you." Couldn't of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don't even disagree with it either.
I am not a fool. I am wise. I will run from my fear, I will outdistance my fear, then I will hide from my fear, I will wait for my fear, I will let my fear run past me, then I will follow my fear, I will track my fear until I can approach my fear in complete silence, then I will strike at my fear, I will charge my fear, I will grab hold of my fear, I will sink my fingers into my fear, then I will bite my fear, I will tear the throat of my fear, I will break the neck of my fear, I will drink the blood of my fear, I will gulp the flesh of my fear, I will crush the bones of my fear, and I will savor my fear, I will swallow my fear, all of it, and then I will digest my fear until I can do nothing else but shit out my fear. In this way I will be made stronger.
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inconsequence) wrote2016-10-16 12:11 pm
quotes.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
I think Yuichi did, too.
When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own. Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time. I've always lived with that knowledge rooted in my being: perhaps that's why Yuichi's way of reacting to things seemed natural to me.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
Jammed between my own bags, stooped over, I sobbed. I had never cried this way in my life. As the hot tears poured out, I remembered that I had never had a proper cry over my grandmother's death. I had a feeling that I wasn't crying over any one sad thing, but rather for many.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
I implored the gods: Please, let me live.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
"Life can be so hard," I said, moved.
"Yes. But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it."
Her hair rustled, brushing her shoulders. There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can't bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.
"I think I understand."
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
Things that my eyes normally take in — telephone poles, street lights, parked cars, the black sky — I could now barely make out. There was a strange beauty to their distortion. Everything came zooming in at me. I felt powerless to stop the energy from rushing out of my body; it seemed to dissipate with a hissing sound into the darkness.
When my parents died I was still a child. When my grandfather died, I had a boyfriend. When my grandmother died I was left all alone. But never had I felt so alone as I did now.
From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a gloomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.
I wanted it to end, and quickly, but for now I would go see Yuichi. Hear everything he had to say, in detail. But what good would that do? What could come of it? It was not a question of hoping for anything. It would mean being flooded with an even more gigantic despair.
Utterly devoid of hope, I rang the doorbell.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
"Really." Yuichi smiled. "Maybe we should go into business. Our clients could pay us to move in with people they want dead. We'll call ourselves destruction workers." His sadly cheerful face radiated a dim glow. We moved deeper into the dead of night. I turned around to look out the window at the flickering lights below. The city was fringed with tiny points of brightness, and the lines of cars were like a phosphorescent river flowing through the darkness.
"So I've become an orphan," said Yuichi.
"That goes double for me. Not that I'm bragging about it," I said, laughing, and suddenly tears began to stream down Yuichi's cheeks.
"I really needed you to make me laugh," he said, rubbing his eyes with his arm, "so much I couldn't stand it anymore."
I reached out and took his face in both hands. "Thank you for calling me," I said softly.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
Houses always feel like that after someone has died.
I sank into the sofa and stared blankly at the melancholy early-winter gray outside the large window. The heavy, cold air of winter permeated every part of this little neighborhood—the park, the walkways—like a fog. I couldn't bear it. It oppressed me, and I felt like I couldn't breathe.
Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko's was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed.
I flopped down on my back and looked up at the dear, familiar ceiling. Right after my grandmother died, I had stared at this same ceiling many an afternoon while Yuichi and Eriko were out. I remember thinking to myself, my grandmother is dead, I've lost my last blood relation, and things can't get any worse. But now they had. Eriko been enormously important to me. In the six months spent together she had always been there for me; she spoiled me.
To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.
My heart was so heavy now because of just that. I watched the gloomy clouds and the orange of the sunset spreading across them in the western sky. Soon the cold night would descend and fill the hollow in my heart. I felt sleepy but said to myself, if you sleep now, you'll have bad dreams. So I got up.
After a long absence I was once again in the Tanabe kitchen. For an instant I had a vision of Eriko's smiling face, and my heart turned over. I felt an urge to get moving. It looked to me like the kitchen had not been used in quite a while. It was somewhat dirty and dark. I began to clean. I scrubbed the sink with scouring powder, wiped off the burners, washed the dishes, sharpened the knives. I washed and bleached all the dish towels, and while watching them go round and round in the dryer I realized that I had become calmer. Why do I love everything that has to do with kitchens so much? It's strange. Perhaps because to me a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul. As I stood there, I seemed to be making a new start; something was coming back.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
I was not afraid of burns or scars; I didn't suffer from sleepless nights. Every day I thrilled with pleasure at the challenges tomorrow would bring. Memorizing the recipe, I would make carrot cakes that included a bit of my soul. At the supermarket I would stare at a bright red tomato, loving it for dear life. Having known such joy, there was no going back. attend the classes, it made sense. Their attitude was completely different from mine.
But—that one summer of bliss. In that kitchen.
No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. This is what makes the life I have now possible.
Inching one's way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can't take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
So even though it was now just the two of us, we avoided talking about Eriko's death, and that omission loomed larger and larger in time and space. But for the time being, "just the two of us" was a warm, safe place where the future was on hold. And yet there was—how should I put this?—a huge, terrifying premonition that those unpaid bills would inexorably come due. The enormity of it only heightened our feeling of being orphans alone in the dark.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
"Yuichi, don't think like that. Let's see what happens," I said, on the verge of tears.
"Right. I won't remember any of this tomorrow. It's always like that. No day has any connection to the one before."
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
Yuichi and I are climbing a narrow ladder in the jet-black gloom. Together we peer into the cauldron of hell. We stare into the bubbling red sea of fire, and the air hitting our faces is so hot it makes us reel. Even though we're standing side by side, even though we're closer to each other than to anyone else in the world, even though we're friends forever, we don't join hands. No matter how forlorn we are, we each insist on standing on our own two feet. But I wonder, as I look at his uneasy profde blazingly illuminated by the hellish fire, although we have always acted like brother and sister, aren't we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don't we think of each other that way? But the place we are in now is just too dreadful. It is not a place where two people can create a life together,
Although I had been earnestly daydreaming until then, I suddenly started to laugh. "I see two lovers looking over the edge of the cauldron of hell. Are they contemplating a double suicide? This means their love will end in hell." I couldn't stop laughing.
I was certainly no fortune-teller.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
It was over, leaving behind the bitter aftertaste of a confrontation in which nothing was gained.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
I understood. I understood it from the color of the sky, the shape of the moon, the blackness of the night sky under which we passed. The building lights, the streetlights, were unforgiving.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
"She was getting closer and closer to the end. One evening, three days before she went into a coma, she said to me, just as I was leaving, 'Please take the pineapple home.' To look at her she didn't seem worse than usual. Naturally we hadn't told her she had cancer, but it was as if she knew, as if she were whispering her last wishes. I was surprised and said, 'Why? I can see that it's withering, but wouldn't you rather have it?' But she begged me, in tears, to take it home, this sunny plant from a southern place, before it became infused with death. I had no choice. I took it in my arms.
"Because I was crying my eyes out, I couldn't take a taxi. It was colder than hell, too. That may have been the first time it occurred to me I didn't like being a man. When I calmed down somewhat, after walking as far as the station and having a drink in a little bar, I took the train. That night the freezing wind whisded through the apartment. With no one there, it could hardly have been called a home. I trembled, holding the pineapple tight against my chest. The sharp leaves stuck my cheeks. In this world, tonight, only the pineapple and I understand each other—that thought came straight from my heart. Closing my eyes, as if against the cold wind, I felt we were the only two living things sharing that loneliness. My wife, who understood me better than anyone, was by now—more than I, more than the pineapple—on intimate terms with death.
"Soon after that she died, and the pineapple withered, too. I didn't know how to care for plants and had overwa- tered it, you see. I stuck it out in a comer of the yard, and although I couldn't have put it into words, I came to understand something. If I try to say what it is now, it's very simple: I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me.
It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman, and here I am."
I understood what she was trying to say, and I remember thinking, listlessly, is this what it means to be happy? But now I feel it in my gut. Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated—defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Still, to cease living is unacceptable.
Tonight, again, I felt the darkness hindering my breathing. In my heavy, depressed sleep, I battled each demon in turn.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
I knew it. I knew it with absolute certainty.
I was at a loss as to what to do. And after all it would be okay to ask.
"When are you coming back?"
After a silence Yuichi said, "Very soon."
He's a bad liar: I was sure he would stay there as long as his money held out. This was the same Yuichi who had delayed telling me about Eriko's death and kept his depression to himself. That was his nature.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
Maybe someday I'd be able to think it over calmly, in a brighter place than this, full of sunlight and flowers. But by then it would be too late.
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
kitchen; banana yoshimoto
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
As a counselor once told me - a counselor for Disaffected Yought, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you." Couldn't of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don't even disagree with it either.
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
So he might say
‘Be not like me. I am alone.'
And it might be heard.
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski
house of leaves; mark z. danielewski