Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,16

apart.

My friend owns a nice used car, the collected works of Balzac, and a black suit, black tie, and black shoes that are perfect for attending funerals. Every time someone dies, I call him and ask if I can borrow them, even though the shoes are one size too big for me.

“Sorry to bother you again,” I said the last time I called. “Another funeral’s come up.”

“Help yourself. You must be in a hurry,” he answered. “Why don’t you come over right away?”

When I arrived, the suit and tie were laid out on the table, neatly pressed, the shoes were polished, and the fridge was full of imported beer. That’s the kind of guy he is.

“The other day I saw a cat at the zoo,” he said, popping open a beer.

“A cat?”

“Yeah, two weeks ago. I was in Hokkaido on business and dropped by a zoo near my hotel. There was a cat asleep in a cage with a sign that said ‘Cat.’”

“What kind of cat?”

“Just an ordinary one. Brown stripes, short tail. And unbelievably fat. It just plopped down on its side and lay there.”

“Maybe cats aren’t so common in Hokkaido.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” he asked, astonished. “There must be cats in Hokkaido. They can’t be that unusual.”

“Well, look at it another way: why shouldn’t there be cats in a zoo?” I said. “They’re animals, too, right?”

“Cats and dogs are your run-of-the-mill-type animals. Nobody’s going to pay money to see them,” he said. “Just look around you—they’re everywhere. Same thing with people.”

When we’d finished off the six-pack, I put the suit and tie and shoe box into a large paper bag.

“Sorry to keep doing this to you,” I said. “I know I should buy my own suit, but somehow I never get around to it. I feel like if I buy funeral clothes I’m saying that it’s OK if somebody dies.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’m not using them anyway. Better to have someone use them than to have them hanging in the closet, right?”

It was true that in the three years since he’d had the suit he’d hardly worn it.

“It’s weird, but since I bought the suit not a single person I know has died,” he explained.

“That’s the way it goes.”

“Yeah, that’s the way it goes,” he said.

For me, on the other hand, it was the Year of Funerals. Friends and former friends died one after another, like ears of corn withering in a drought. I was twenty-eight. My friends were all about the same age—twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Not exactly the right age to die.

A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty-four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. You’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six-lane highway—whether you want to be or not. You get your hair cut; every morning you shave. You aren’t a poet anymore, or a revolutionary or a rock star. You don’t pass out drunk in phone booths or blast out the Doors at four in the morning. Instead, you buy life insurance from your friend’s company, drink in hotel bars, and hold on to your dental bills for tax deductions. At twenty-eight, that’s normal.

But that’s exactly when the unexpected massacre began. It was like a surprise attack on a lazy spring day—as if someone, on top of a metaphysical hill, holding a metaphysical machine gun, had sprayed us with bullets. One minute we were changing our clothes, and the next minute they didn’t fit anymore: the sleeves were inside out, and we had one leg in one pair of pants, the other in a different pair. A complete mess.

But that’s what death is. A rabbit is a rabbit whether it springs out of a hat or a wheat field. A hot oven is a hot oven, and the black smoke rising from a chimney is what it is—black smoke rising from a chimney.

The first person to straddle the divide between reality and unreality (or unreality and reality) was a friend from college who taught English at a junior high school. He’d been married for three years, and his wife had gone back to her parents’ house in Shikoku to have their baby.

One unusually warm Sunday afternoon in January, he went to a department store and bought two cans of shaving cream and a German-made knife big enough to lop off an elephant’s ear. He went home and ran a bath.