South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,49
much as hold her hand.
Back on the streets of Tokyo, Shimamoto had her usual cool, attractive smile. No more the rush of violent emotions she displayed on that cold February day in Ishikawa. The warm closeness born on that day was gone. As if by unspoken agreement, we never once mentioned our strange little trip.
As we walked side by side, I wondered what feelings she held in her heart. And where those feelings would lead her. Sometimes I looked deep into her eyes, but all I could detect was a gentle silence. As before, the line of her eyelids brought to mind the horizon, far off in the distance. At long last I could understand Izumi’s loneliness when we were going out Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter. Once, the door to that world had begun to open a crack. But now it was closed.
I felt again like a helpless, confused twelve-year-old. I had no idea what I should do, what I should say. I tried my best to stay calm and use my head. But it was hopeless. Everything I said and did was wrong. Every emotion was swallowed up in that radiant smile. Don’t worry, her smile told me. It’s all right.
I was completely in the dark regarding Shimamoto’s life. I didn’t even know where she lived. Or who she lived with. Whether she was married, or had been. The only thing I knew was that last February she had had a baby, which died the next day. And that she’d never worked. Still, she always wore the most expensive-looking clothes and accessories, which meant that she had a fair amount of money. That’s all I knew about her. She was probably married when she had the baby, but I couldn’t be sure. Thousands of babies are born out of wedlock every day, right?
As time passed, Shimamoto began to talk bit by bit about her junior high school and high school days. There being no direct connection between those days and her present life, she didn’t mind talking about them. I discovered how terribly lonely she had been. As she grew up, she tried her very best to be fair to everyone around her, never to make excuses. “Start making excuses, and there’s no end to it,” she told me. “I can’t live that kind of life.” But things didn’t work out well. Her attitude only gave rise to stupid misunderstandings, which hurt her deeply. Steadily, she shut herself away. Waking up in the morning, she’d vomit and refuse to go to school.
She showed me a photograph taken when she entered high school. She was sitting on a chair in a garden, with sunflowers in bloom around her. It was summer, and she had on denim shorts and a white T-shirt She was gorgeous. Facing the camera, she was smiling broadly. Compared to her smile now, she looked a bit self-conscious. Even so, it was a wonderful smile. The kind of smile that, through its very precariousness, affected people all the more. Certainly not the smile of a lonely girl spending each day in misery.
“Judging by this picture,” I told her, “I’d say you were the happiest girl in the world.”
She shook her head slowly. Charming lines appeared at the corners of her eyes; she looked as if she were recalling some far-off scene from the past “Hajime, you can’t tell anything from photographs. They’re just a shadow. The real me is far away. That won’t show up in a picture.”
The photograph brought a pain to my chest. It made me realize what an awful amount of time I had lost. Precious years that could never be recovered, no matter how much I struggled to bring them back. Time that existed only then, only in that place. I gazed at the photo for the longest time.
“What’s so interesting about the picture?” she asked.
“I’m trying to fill in time,” I replied. “It’s been twenty-five years since I saw you last. I want to fill in that gap, even a little.”
She smiled and looked at me quizzically, as if there was something weird about my face. “It’s strange,” she said. “You want to fill in that blank space of time, but I want to keep it all blank.”
From junior high through high school, she never had a real boyfriend. She was a beautiful girl, so boys paid attention to her, but she barely noticed them. She