a herd of Charlie Parkers!”
She ordered another cocktail. And lit another cigarette. We were silent for a long while. She seemed lost in thought. I listened to the bassist play a long solo in “Embraceable You.” The pianist added the occasional accompanying chord, while the drummer wiped away his sweat and had a drink. A regular at the bar came up to me, and we chatted for a while.
“Hajime,” Shimamoto said a long time later. “Do you know any good rivers? A pretty river in a valley, not too big, one that flows fairly swiftly right into the sea?”
Taken by surprise, I looked at her. “A river?” What was she talking about? Her face was utterly expressionless. She was quiet, as if gazing at some faraway landscape. Maybe it was me who was far away—far from her world, at least with an unimaginable distance separating us. The thought made me sad. There was something in her eyes that called up sadness.
“What’s with this river all of a sudden?” I asked.
“It just suddenly occurred to me,” she answered. “Do you know any river like that?”
When I was a student, I traveled around the country quite a bit lugging a sleeping bag. So I’d seen quite a few Japanese rivers. But I couldn’t come up with the kind of river she described.
“I think there might be a river like that on the Japan Sea coast,” I said after a great deal of thought. “I don’t remember what it’s called. But I’m sure it’s in Ishikawa Prefecture. It wouldn’t be hard to find. It’s probably the closest to what you’re after.”
I recalled that river clearly. I went there on fall break when I was a sophomore or a junior in college. The fall foliage was beautiful, the surrounding mountains looking as though they were dyed in blood. The mountains ran down to the sea, the rush of the water was gorgeous, and sometimes you could hear the cry of deer in the forest. The fish I ate were out of this world.
“Do you think you could take me there?” Shimamoto asked.
“It’s all the way over in Ishikawa,” I said in a dry voice. “Enoshima I could see, but we’d have to fly, then drive for at least an hour. And stay overnight. I’m sure you understand that’s something I can’t do at the moment.”
Shimamoto shifted slowly on her stool and turned to face me. “Hajime, I know I shouldn’t be asking this favor of you. I know that. Believe me, I realize it’s a burden to you. But there’s no one else I can ask. I have to go there, and I don’t want to go alone.”
I looked into her eyes. Her eyes were like a deep spring in the shade of cliffs, which no breeze could ever reach. Nothing moved there, everything was still. Look closely, and you could just begin to make out the scene reflected in the water’s surface.
“Forgive me.” She smiled, as if all the strength had left her. “Please don’t think I came here just to ask you that I wanted only to see you and talk. I didn’t plan to bring this up.”
I made a quick mental calculation of the time. “If we left really early in the morning and did a round trip by plane, we should be able to make it back by not too late at night. Of course, it depends on how much time we spend there.”
“I don’t think it’ll take too long,” she said. “Can you really spare the time? The time to fly over there and back with me?”
I thought a bit. “I think so. I can’t say anything definitely yet But I can probably make the time. Call me here tomorrow night, all right? I’ll be here at this time. I’ll figure out our plan by then. What’s your schedule?”
“I don’t have any schedule. Any time that’s fine with you is fine with me.”
I nodded.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have met you again, after all. I know I’ll only end up ruining everything.”
She left just a little before eleven. I held an umbrella over her and flagged down a cab. The rain was still falling.
“Goodbye. And thank you,” she said.
“Goodbye,” I said.
I went back into the bar and returned to the same seat at the counter. Her cocktail glass was still there. As was the ashtray, with several crushed-out Salems. I didn’t have the waiter take them away. For the longest time, I gazed at the faint