South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,60
kid and listened to this record, I used to wonder what it was that lay south of the border,” I said.
“Me too,” she said. “When I grew up and could read the English lyrics, I was disappointed. It was just a song about Mexico. I’d always thought something great lay south of the border.”
“Like what?”
Shimamoto brushed her hair back and lightly gathered it behind. “I’m not sure. Something beautiful, big, and soft.”
“Something beautiful, big, and soft,” I repeated. “Was it edible?”
She laughed. Her white teeth showed faintly. “I doubt it.”
“Something you can touch?”
“Probably.”
“Again with the probablys.”
“A world full of probablys,” she said.
I stretched out my hand and laid it on top of her fingers on the back of the sofa. I hadn’t touched her body for so very long, not since the plane ride back from Ishikawa. As my fingers grazed hers, she looked up at me briefly, then down again.
“South of the border, west of the sun,” she said.
“West of the sun?”
“Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana?”
“No.”
“I read this somewhere a long time ago. Might have been in junior high. I can’t for the life of me recall what book I read it in. Anyway, it affects farmers living in Siberia. Try to imagine this. You’re a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it’s directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep.”
“Not exactly the lifestyle of an Aoyama bar owner.”
“Hardly.” She smiled and inclined her head ever so slightly. “Anyway, that cycle continues, year after year.”
“But in Siberia they don’t work in the fields in winter.”
“They rest in the winter,” she said. “In the winter they stay home and do indoor work. When spring comes, they head out to the fields again. You’re that farmer. Imagine it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And then one day, something inside you dies.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.”
I tried to conjure up the picture of a Siberian farmer lying dead on the ground.
“But what is there, west of the sun?” I asked.
She again shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe something. At any rate, it’s different from south of the border.”
When Nat King Cole began singing “Pretend,” Shimamoto, as she had done so very long before, sang along in a small voice.
Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue
It isn’t very hard to do
“Shimamoto-san,” I said, “after you left, I thought about you for a long time. Every day for six months, from morning to night I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. And I came to this conclusion. I can’t make it without you. I don’t ever want to lose you again. I don’t want to hear the words for a while anymore. Or probably. You’ll say we can’t see each other for a while, and then you’ll disappear. And no one can say when you’ll be back. You might never be back, and I might spend the rest of my life never seeing you again. And I couldn’t stand that. Life would be meaningless.”
Shimamoto looked at me silently, still faintly smiling. A quiet smile that nothing could ever touch, revealing nothing to me of what lay beyond. Confronted with that smile, I felt as if my own emotions were about to be lost to me. For an instant I lost my bearings, my sense of who and where I was. After a while, though, words returned.
“I love you,” I told her. “Nothing can change it. Special feelings like that should never, ever be taken away. I’ve lost you many times. But I should never have let you go. These last several months have taught me that I love you, and I don’t