The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto Read Free Book Online Page A

a huge shock when she died. But I get the sense he’s been hurt in some way much deeper than that.”
    “I hope whatever it is isn’t still an issue.”
    “Oh, I think it is—I feel it. I’m just hoping it’s not so bad that he can’t go on living with it. And hey, he’s made it this far, right? Maybe everything will be fine, and it’s just a matter of going on with his life, treating it as gently as possible.”
    I spoke like I was praying. Please , I thought, keep living .
    Nothing I could ever do would relieve Nakajima of his pain. That had only become clear once we started living together. I had seen him wake up screaming in the middle of the night and bolt up, trembling; I’d seen him break into a sweat when he found himself in a crowd; I’d seen certain kinds of music give him terrible headaches; and I’d had to listen to him telling me that for a long time after his mother died, what he wanted more than anything was to follow her. These were just fragments, but the longer we were a couple, the more I saw.
    When there’s a plus, there’s always a minus. If there’s a powerful light, the darkness that is its opposite will be just as strong. To me, Nakajima seemed like a creature in a legend, unable to control the forces raging within him.
    “In this line of work, I come into contact with kids who have all sorts of troubles,” Sayuri said. “Some are just cruel by nature, and some have mental problems, but other than that I get the sense that usually it’s the parents who are the problem. When something happens with the parent of a really young child, something seems to get paralyzed inside, or broken, and even if it’s a really tiny part, it has to be built up again. I see that pretty often. It’s really true, there’s something huge in people like that that can’t be whitewashed over. It’s like, you’re at a loss for what to do, because they’ve been broken in so many different ways, so subtly. I’m just a piano teacher so I don’t actually have to deal with that stuff, but if you’re a preschool teacher or something, you have to interact with the parents a lot more, and I just think that would be so hard. There are so many messed-up families these days, too many. Screwed-up parents.”
    I nodded. Even out by the wall, where I was painting the mural, I could tell. There were parents and children of a sort you never would have seen before, mixed in among all the rest. I didn’t think Nakajima was one of them, though. His problem was different.
    “I know something happened to him, that much is clear, and it obviously wasn’t a subtle sort of thing. There must have been some really big event in his past. Only in his case—well, from what I can tell, his parents were divorced, but I don’t have the sense it was particularly acrimonious, you know, and I know his mother loved him really deeply, and it doesn’t seem like anything happened with her, so I don’t think it was a problem with his parents. That’s the impression I get, judging from the bits and pieces I’ve heard. Above all, Nakajima himself is just such a nice person.… I know I keep repeating myself, but really the only thing I can be sure of is that something appalling happened.”
    “Appalling? Like how?”
    “Like he was kidnapped, or sexually abused, though not by his parents.”
    The moment I heard myself saying that, something clicked.
    Every so often, that happens. I say it, and I realize it’s true. Something close to an answer lay in the words I’d just spoken. I was convinced of it. But I decided just to keep talking.
    “Anyway, he’s not like other people at all, it’s like, I don’t know how to describe it, like he’s living in the clouds, maybe. Like when people talk about someone having transcended it all—he’s like that, I guess. So part of me thinks it’s just in his makeup, and he would have been this way even if nothing had happened. For the time being I’ll just keep watching, I won’t rush