Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto Read Free Book Online Page B

almost finished with a two-liter bottle of sake I had been drinking, little by little, and I was very drunk.
    “I know, why don’t I put on some music?” said Chizuru.
    Since she didn’t sleep at night, she loved it when I tried to stay up late.
    She looked so happy. Just like a child.
    Chizuru put on a random CD. It was rather loud, but it still sounded muffled, as if the sound were being absorbed by the fog.
    The couple upstairs carried on undisturbed, having such a wild time that every so often we would hear great splashes of water or a big crash as they knocked over the washbasin, or sometimes, in the midst of it all, started discussing their children’s education. Everything was so clearly audible that I began to suspect they were doing it with the bathroom window wide open.
    “It’s amazing. They sure have a lot of stamina...” I said.
    To my drunken eyes, Chizuru looked kind of transparent. Maybe it was the color of her skin, or maybe it was the fog, or maybe it was just the sort of person she was. It occurred to me that we might not have much longer together.
    For some reason, it seemed natural that a creature like her, who didn’t sleep at night and hardly ate a thing, wouldn’t live very long.
    “Personally, I don’t really mind,” said Chizuru. She smiled as she listened, entranced, to the mixture of the music and the noises upstairs. “Hearing people makes me feel safe. I don’t know, for me, it’s kind of a mom-and-dad sound.”
    “There’s a bit too much of the mom-and-dad aspect, don’t you think?” I said. “I wouldn’t mind if they chose a slightly milder way of expressing it.”
    Chizuru laughed. “I don’t agree. They’re all nice warm sounds—the sounds of two parents who went in to take a bath together one night and got to talking about this and that as they washed each other’s bodies, and sort of got in the mood.”
    I didn’t matter either way. I was much more interested in looking at Chizuru sitting there by the window, the fog and the glow from the headlights at her back. She looked as if she might vanish then and there. As I gazed at her, I began to feel uneasy, then afraid. Is this our world or the world beyond? I couldn’t tell. That must be why Chizuru felt safe when she heard those mom-and-dad sounds—they let her feel that there was something holding her here, on this side.
    Everything up to this point was, I’m sure, a mixture of memory and dream.
    But then Chizuru turned to face me from outside the window.
    “By the way,” she said, “I wanted to tell you that the Chizuru you saw in that dream you had earlier—that wasn’t me. This me—the one you’re seeing now, in this dream, as you lie sleeping in the woman’s room—this is the real me. And you know that shrine you saw earlier? It’s nothing to worry about. Really. After today, it won’t bother you again. Since I saw that you were in trouble, I kept an eye on you, all along.”
    Those eyes, the way they looked right through me. Chizuru’s eyes.
    Tears welled up in my own eyes.
    “Thank you,” I said, taking her cold hand in mine.
    I awoke with a start to find myself in a dark, shabby-looking room that I didn’t remember having seen before.
    A faint light glimmered through the curtains.
    Where the hell am I? I sprang up and saw the woman lying in another part of the room, sound asleep and snoring.
    Her hair, which was run through with strands of white, and her nostrils, and those horribly tacky striped pajamas... they touched a tender chord in me now. Her receptionist’s uniform hung neatly on the wall.
    It’s people like her, I thought, who keep the world turning.
    Feeling a sense of relief, I drifted off to sleep again.
    At last this night will end.

7
    Morning Light
    So morning came. And I went back up to my room.
    Bathed in the light of a cloudless morning, it was amazing how peaceful it was. I couldn’t imagine what had been so frightening the night before.
    I took a shower and got