Nao-Cola Yamazaki
TRANS. BY Polly Barton
Logic and Sensitivity Are Not Incompatible
Ayumi Kandagawa and Hideo Mano lived together in a south-facing, double-aspect 48m2 two-bedroom apartment complete with tatami matting in the bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen with laminated flooring, and a bathroom with dedicated boiler and separate toilet, situated on the second floor of a twenty-year old apartment block just twelve minutes’ walk from the station, for a monthly rent of ¥140,000. The two had known each other since university. They started dating after they graduated and got jobs, and then, a year later, in the fall that they both turned twentyfour, moved in together.
When they first moved in, Mano went around taking photographs with his digital camera to record the condition of the apartment. It seemed he wanted to avoid an argument with the landlord when the time came for them to move out and to reclaim their deposit about whether or not the place was in a worse state than when they came in.
As he was snapping away in the bathroom, he asked Kandagawa,
“Have you ever used a bath like this before?”
“No, never,” said Kandagawa. “You?”
She peered down at the bathtub over Mano’s shoulder. Square pale blue tiles covered the bathroom walls. The bathtub was a tarnished silver, and there was an old-fashioned gas boiler beside it, operated by a knob you had to push in to turn. One position on the dial of the knob read ignite, the other, extinguish. There was a crevice between the bathtub and the wall. What a crappy bath, Kandagawa thought. It would be difficult to clean, plus it was old looking and a bit the worse for wear.
“I have, yeah. I had one of these in my old place. You’ve really got to be careful with these kinds of baths, you know. When you want hot water, you’ve got to turn this switch. That turns on the gas. If you don’t, it doesn’t heat up at all. But then once you stop using the water, you’ve got to remember to turn it off, otherwise you’ll cause a fire.”
Mano spoke carefully, as if to a child.
“No! Not a fire...” said Kandagawa, half-heartedly. She thought Mano was being a bit over-dramatic.
“Let’s practice,” Mano said, and made Kandagawa repeatedly turn on and off the gas. Kandagawa found herself lost for words.
Mano always worried about things like forgetting to lock the door or turn off the lights. Each time the two of them went for a stroll, Mano would say things like, “Did you remember to lock the door?” or “We didn’t bring an umbrella. Do you think it’s going to rain?” Kandagawa thought he was an idiot, because he never looked at the flowers or the sky as he was walking. But then she also found that aspect of him quite endearing. It was kind of cute that you could get to the age of twenty-four and have absolutely no idea about the names of flowers or clouds.
When the window of their apartment was open, they could see a plum tree down below.
“Look, the plum tree’s blossoming! . . . Over there. The white one.”
Kandagawa pointed to the tree, which stood within the grounds of the apartment block.
“That’s a plum tree?” said Mano. It was not the reaction she was expecting.
“You really didn’t know?”
“Nope.”
“What did you think the flowers that always bloomed in February were, then?”
“You know, I really don’t get why everybody goes so crazy for flowers. What’s so good about them? I think I actively dislike them, actually. When I walk past a flower shop, I always look away.”
Mano was the king of trivia. His general knowledge was great and he was good at talking. But there were weird holes in his knowledge. He didn’t know any of the names of flowers. Camellias and plum flowers and rapeseed all looked the same to him. He couldn’t tell them apart.
Vegetables weren’t a strong point, either. He had only come to recognize okra and pak choi since moving in with Kandagawa. Before then, it seemed that the only vegetables he had been aware of as distinct entities were carrots and onions. All greens he lumped together and referred to as just “veg.”
Fish were yet another blind spot. One day, Kandagawa cooked him grilled sawara Saikyo style, with white miso marinade—a fairly classic dish, but as Mano stared down at the white piece of fish perched on his rectangular blue plate, he said,
“What is this?”
“It’s sawara,” Kandagawa said.
“Sawara! Okay. I’m gonna remember that. Sawara, sawara, sawara,” said Mano. He seemed to find the whole enterprise fun.
A few days later, when Kandagawa cooked mackerel in miso and ginger sauce, another classic combination, Mano asked,
“Is this sawara?”
“Yup,” Kandagawa answered, not having the energy to disillusion him.
“Right,” said Mano, nodding earnestly. After that, he also referred to tuna sashimi, and to the tiny whitebait that they would sprinkle on top of their rice as sawara, and so it was that, eventually, sawara became their name for all fish.
They ate all the foods traditional to each time of year. At the start of spring they ate the delicate bulb-like shoots of the giant butterbur, in mid-summer they ate grilled eel, at Christmas they ate cake, on the seventh of January they ate rice porridge with seven types of herbs, on Valentine’s Day they ate chocolate. Mano, who had always been the cynical type—having a jibe at Disneyland wherever possible or declaring that he would personally take it upon himself to stamp on each and every one of the lights making up the Christmas decorations in town—began to say that being able to enjoy festivities for what they were might actually be a sign of maturity. It seemed that, since finding a job and becoming a real member of society, his ideas about things were beginning to change.
When the two of them started dating, they would occasionally fight.
Mano would say things like, “I’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” or, “Do you have any sense at all of actually wanting to convey your ideas to other people?” or “It’s impossible to tell what you’re saying when you try and explain things. In future, can you write them down and email them to me or something?” Kandagawa would argue back, saying things like, “Why can’t you just be yourself when you talk?” or “Just say what you actually think without dressing it up,” or “You think everything in the world can be explained by logic, don’t you? But there’d still be a million things in this world that you wouldn’t be capable of explaining, even if that were true.” After a while, though, the fights started happening less and less frequently. They both realized that it was totally futile trying to make these kinds of demands of one another.
“Listen, when we get into a fight, let’s both try and not step inside the other person’s sumo ring, okay?” Mano suggested one time.
Kandagawa accepted his proposal.
“That’s a good idea. I think we should try and appreciate one another from our own perspectives, rather than always aiming to see things through the other person’s eyes.”
It is incredibly patronizing to think that making an effort to converse with someone with a different way of going about things than you entails trying to meet the other person in whatever dimension they inhabit. For example, logical reasoning wasn’t necessarily Kandagawa’s strong point, but it was infuriating when the person she was talking to tried to spoonfeed her an over-simplified explanation. I’m not an idiot, she would think. It’s not that I’m incapable of understanding complex things. Just say things in whatever way you want to say them!
On the other hand, when Kandagawa unleashed the full force of her sensibilities in a conversation with someone, she found it exasperating when she saw that that person was desperately trying to tune in to her channel, as if what she was saying could only be understood by people who felt exactly the same as she did. Use your own ears to listen!
And so the two of them sumo wrestled alone.
After all, they didn’t need to understand each other. All they wanted to do was to like each other.
Kandagawa and Mano had each taken one of the two tatami rooms as their own, but one of the six tatami mats making up each of these rooms was taken as the property of the person whose room it wasn’t. In other words, each of them had given up one corner of their own room to the other person. One of the tatami mats in Kandagawa’s room was Mano’s space, and it had Mano’s magazines and cushions on it. Mano would sometimes come into her room and sit on his mat. Kandagawa would say, “Move off that mat and it’ll cost you five hundred yen.” In truth, though, she’d never actually charged him five hundred yen, and the boundary of the tatami mats became blurred over time, and sometimes they both ended up encroaching on the other’s feelings, or sleeping in the same bed.
A year passed.
One day, when Kandagawa came home late from work, Mano was sitting waiting for her at the dining table, reading a book with a steely expression on his face.
“Will you just come here a minute?” he said, and led her to the bathroom.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Today, when Mano came home from work, he discovered that the bath was astonishingly hot. The gas was still switched on, and the boiler was running. Now, why do you think that might be?”
Mano’s tone was overly cool. With a sneer, he pointed to the dial at the corner of the bath.
“Oh shit!” Kandagawa put her hand up to her forehead.
“You took a shower this morning before work, right, after I left? And you forgot to turn off the gas?”
“Yep.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Am I smiling?” Kandagawa didn’t mean to be smiling.
“You don’t look like you feel the slightest bit sorry about it.”
“Really?”
“Well, I guess what happened, happened. But we’ve got to think about what to do from now. How are we going to prevent this problem reoccurring?”
“Ahhh, the old reoccurrence problem . . .”
“Are you messing around with me?”
“Yes.”
“You never, ever take anything seriously, do you?”
“I’m really not a serious person, no. In fact, there hasn’t been a single second
of my life up until now where I’ve behaved in a serious way.”
“Why are you always messing around?”
“Oh Mano, I always thought you liked me just as I was, lack of seriousness and all.”
“But if there’s a fire, there won’t be any room to mess around any more! You must see that, right?”
“That’s what gets me off, though, don’t you see? It’s that edginess that’s what life is all about. Your mediocre, happy existence could vanish into thin air at any moment, just like that. Poof! It’s a fucking thrill! Living like you’re just about to step off the edge of a cliff – that’s the way to go about things.”
“You’re really, really making me angry. Just . . . don’t speak any more.”
“Why? I’m just . . . mmph gmmph.”
Kandagawa tried to say more, but Mano covered her mouth with his hand. Just the sound of her voice seemed to enrage Mano beyond all belief. Even if the gas incident hadn’t occurred, Kandagawa thought to herself, Mano would still have found another reason to be angry. She was sure he had been letting his frustration build up, as though he was paying for all of the stress that came with living with her on credit and gradually amassing huge debts for himself that he had failed to notice. Mano abruptly went off into his room, and returned with a sheet of A4 printer paper and a marker pen. He placed the paper on top of the dining table, wrote turn off the gas! in big letters, and stuck it to the back of the front door with tape.
“Look at this before you go out,” he said, pointing at the piece of paper. Not knowing what else to do, Kandagawa nodded.
Mano went back into his room, and she could hear him rustling about. After a while he came back into the kitchen. He was wearing a suit, and had a rucksack on his back.
“Now where are you going at this hour, pray tell?”
“I’m going to the station to get a cab to go to Mutoh’s house. I’m gonna stay there.”
Mutoh was a mutual friend who lived near the next station on the line.
“Don’t you think you’ll give Mutoh a bit of a shock, turning up like that?”
“He doesn’t mind. It’s Friday night. I called him just now and he told me it was fine to come over.”
“Oh, no, Mano, please don’t go!”
“You’re messing around again, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I think if I stay here now something drastic is going to happen, so I’m gonna stay with Mutoh for a while.”
“What do you mean, ‘something drastic’? Are you saying you want to break up?”
“What I’m saying is, I’m going to get some space so that doesn’t happen. I’ll be in touch.”
“Fine. Bye.”
“See you.”
Mano yanked the door open and went out. The turn off the gas! sign rippled behind him.
While Mano was out of the apartment, Kandagawa hung out in his room. She turned on his computer and found pictures of pin-up girls and female TV presenters in his My Documents folder. Oddly enough, there were loads of pictures of the model Yuko Ogura in there. Mano had said to Kandagawa that he thought she was stupid and should start acting her age, but it seemed like actually he thought she was cute. What was a funny man he was.
She started reading the books from his bookshelf: Hideo Kobayashi, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Takeshi Yoro, Jun Miura, Milan Kundera, Kou Machida, Gabriel García Márquez, Akio Miyazawa, Charles Bukowski, and so on. There were lots Kandagawa didn’t know at all, but once she got started, they turned out to be pretty interesting. She had always thought that she and Mano had different tastes in things, but maybe that wasn’t actually true. They were both into books, but they’d never really had a proper conversation about them. She’d assumed they’d just end up fighting if they tried to talk about things they were invested in, or that the conversation wouldn’t really take off because they tended to respond to different things. When Mano came back, Kandagawa thought, she would try and talk to him about books. Although he might not come back at all, of course. Having said all that, though, it was striking how Mano’s book collection was so full of pathetic men.
Two weeks later, Mano came back.
“Hello,” Kandagawa said, as though nothing had happened.
“Hello,” Mano replied, in just the same way as he always did, and came in the door.
“Did you bring me a souvenir?” Kandagawa said it as a joke, but Mano produced a big box from behind his back.
“Yep,” he said. “It’s a hotplate.”
“Yesssss!”
“Let’s make pancakes!”
“Yeah!”
Kandagawa’s hand shot up in agreement. So, Mano had remembered Kandagawa saying in the past that she wanted a hot plate, and now he was attempting to use it as a way of smoothing over their troubles. That was kind of cute, Kandagawa thought. Mano was a good boyfriend, after all.
The two of them went down to the local convenience store and bought pancake mix and milk and brown eggs. They went back to the apartment, and mixed up the batter in a silver bowl with a whisk. They set up the hot plate and switched it on, and, once it was warm, greased it.
“Okay, Round One!” Mano shouted.
“It’s tiny . . . Ooh, it’s a panda . . . Oh now look, it’s Saturn, look . . .”
Fooling around, Kandagawa made a funny-shaped pancake.
“Okay, I’m going to make one in the shape of your face.” Mano said.
“My face isn’t that round! I’ve got a face shaped like a melonseed.”
“A melonseed?”
“Okay, fine, a circle is fine.”
“You can do my face too.”
“But glasses are difficult. Take your glasses off.”
Mano took off his glasses, and Kandagawa, seizing her opportunity, stood up and kissed him. Mano made a “hmph” noise.
Kandagawa made Mano’s face. When the pancakes formed bubbles, they flipped them over. The Saturn and the two faces weren’t well-shaped, but they served them onto a dish, spread them with butter, and ate them with maple syrup.
“Mm, they’re delicious!”
“To be honest, I don’t really get what the fuss is all about with pancakes.’”
“Really?”
“If the world was full of people like me, the only things that there would be to eat would be rice and salt.”
“Ha! That would definitely make things a lot easier.”
“I just eat to be full, really. That’s it. But there are other people in this world who go about inventing all these kinds of fancy foods, like pancakes. I think that’s pretty interesting.”
“Inventing, eh . . . Hmmm.”
“Seriously, I think it’s interesting. It’s like how night is interesting because it brings not only darkness, but also cold. Music is interesting because it’s not just pitch, but also rhythm. And having you in the apartment with me makes it interesting.”
“For real! Are you sweet-talking me, Mano?”
“I feel like since I started living with you, my life has become colorful.”
“When I’m with you, I notice my life having a lot more meaning to it . . .”
“Wow.”
“Okay. Round Two!”
The two of them made a bunch of small round circles on the hotplate with the cream-colored batter.
And they lived happily ever after . . . is the way I’d love to end this story, but of course life doesn’t always work out that easily, and the pair’s cohabitation came to an end three years later, and they went their separate ways. But the memory of the time they shared twinkled on in both of their minds for ever after.
Nao-Cola Yamazaki debuted in 2004 with the Bungei Award-winning novella Don’t Laugh At Other People’s Sex. They have published over ten novels, essay collections, and a children’s book, and has been nominated for the Akutagawa Prize five times. Their latest release is Utsukushii Kyori (A Beautiful Distance), published in July 2016.
Polly Barton was raised in London and lives in Osaka. Aside from Nao-Cola Yamazaki, she has translated a variety of Japanese literary fiction and non-fiction, including work by Aoko Matsuda and Misumi Kubo. She is a 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant recipient. Her translation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden was published by Pushkin Press in 2017.