South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,36

No precedents to worry about or Ministry of Education position papers to contend with. Believe me, it’s great. Have you ever worked in a company?”

She smiled and shook her head. “No.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Me and companies just don’t get along. I don’t think you’d find it any different. Eight years working there convinced me. Eight years down the tubes. My twenties—the best years of all. Sometimes I wonder how I put it up with it for so long. I guess that’s what I had to go through, though, to wind up where I am today. Now I love my job. You know, sometimes my bars feel like imaginary places I created in my mind. Castles in the air. I plant some flowers here, construct a fountain there, crafting everything with great care. People stop by, have drinks, listen to music, talk, and go home. People are willing to spend a lot of money to come all this way to have some drinks—and do you know why? Because everyone’s seeking the same thing: an imaginary place, their own castle in the air, and their very own special corner of it.”

Shimamoto extracted a Salem from her small purse. Before she could take out her lighter, I struck a match and lit her cigarette. I liked to light her cigarettes and watch her eyes narrow as she stared at the flickering flame.

“I haven’t worked a single day in my life,” she said.

“Not even once?”

“Not even once. Not even a part-time job. Labor is totally alien to me. That’s why I envy you. I’m always alone, reading books. And any thoughts that happen to occur to me have to do with spending money, not making it.” She stretched both arms out in front of me. On her right arm she wore two thin gold bracelets, on her left arm an expensive-looking gold watch. She kept her arms in front of me for a long while, as if they were displaying goods for sale. I took her right hand in mine and gazed for a time at the gold bracelets. I recalled her holding my hand when I was twelve. I could remember exactly how it felt And how it had thrilled me.

“I don’t know … maybe thinking about ways to spend money is best, after all,” I said. I let go of her hand and felt that I was about to drift away somewhere. “When you’re always scheming about ways to make money, it’s like a part of you is lost.”

“But you don’t know how empty it feels not to be able to create anything.”

“I’m sure you’ve created more things than you realize.”

“What sort of things?”

“Things you can’t see,” I replied. I examined my hands, resting on my knees.

She held her glass and looked at me for a long while. “You mean like feelings?”

“Right,” I said. “Everything disappears someday. Like this bar–it won’t go on forever. People’s tastes change, and a minor fluctuation in the economy is all it’d take for it to go under. I’ve seen it happen; it doesn’t take much. Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”

“But you know, Hajime, some feelings cause us pain because they remain. Don’t you think so?”

The tenor saxophonist came over to thank me for the whiskey. I complimented him on his performance.

“Jazz musicians these days are so polite,” I explained to Shimamoto. “When I was in college, that wasn’t the case. They all took drugs, and at least half of them were deadbeats. But sometimes you could hear these performances that would blow you away. I was always listening to jazz at the jazz clubs in Shinjuku. Always looking to be blown away.”

“You like those kinds of people, don’t you.”

“Must be,” I said. “People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That’s what can move the world. That’s art.”

I looked again at my hands, resting on my knees. Then I looked up at her. She was waiting for me to continue.

“Anyway, things are different now. I’m the manager of a bar, and my job’s to invest capital and show a profit. I’m not an artist or someone about to create anything. I’m not a patron of the arts. Like it or not, this isn’t the place to look for art. And for the manager, it’s a lot easier to have a neatly turned out, polite group than