TONY TAKITANI
Tony Takitani’s real name was really that: Tony Takitani.
Because of his name and his curly hair and his somewhat deeply sculpted features, he was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. This was just after the war, when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American GI. But Tony Takitani’s mother and father were both one hundred percent genuine Japanese. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly well-known jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War broke out, he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. In those days, Shanghai was an easy one-day’s boat ride from Nagasaki. Shozaburo owned nothing in Tokyo—or anywhere else in Japan—that he would hate to lose. He left without regrets. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo. He was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the first time he saw Shanghai’s elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun, and that did it. He fell in love with the town. The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous brightness. He was twenty-one years old.
And so he took it easy all through the upheaval of the war—from the Japanese invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic bombs—playing his trombone in Shanghai nightclubs. The war was happening somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed not the slightest hint of will or introspection with regard to history. He wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him with great kindness and good feeling. Which is why most people liked him. Young, handsome, and good on his horn, he stood out like a crow on a snowy day wherever he went. He slept with more women than he could count. Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls, and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant penis made him a Shanghai sensation.
Shozaburo Takitani was also blessed—though he himself did not realize it—with a talent for making “useful” friends. He was on great terms with high-ranking Japanese Army officers, Chinese millionaires, and all kinds of influential types who were sucking up gigantic profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols under their jackets and never walked out of a building without giving the street a quick scan right and left. He and they just “clicked” for some strange reason. And they took special care of him. They were always glad to open doors for him whenever problems came up. Life was a breeze for Shozaburo Takitani in those years.
Fine talents can sometimes work against you, though. When the war ended, his dubious connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was locked up for a long time. Day after day, the others who had been imprisoned like Shozaburo Takitani were taken out of their cells and executed without trial. Guards would just show up, drag them into the prison yard, and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. It always happened at two o’clock in the afternoon. The tight, hard crack of a pistol would echo through the yard.
This was the greatest crisis that Shozaburo Takitani had ever faced. A literal hair’s breadth separated life from death. He assumed he would be dying in this place. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly. They’d put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split second of pain. I’ve lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought, and I’ve slept with tons of women. I’ve eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of good times. There’s not that much in life I’m sorry I missed. Besides, I’m not in any position to complain about being killed. It’s just the way it goes. What more could I ask for? Millions of Japanese have died in this war, and lots of them in far more terrible ways than what is going to happen to me. He resigned himself to his fate and whistled away the hours in his cell. Day after day he watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny window and painted mental pictures on the cell’s filthy walls of the faces and bodies of the many women he had slept with. In the end, though, Shozaburo Takitani turned out to be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home to Japan. By that time the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. Shozaburo Takitani stood on the deck of the boat repatriating him, and as he watched the avenues of Shanghai shrinking away in the distance, he thought, Life: I’ll never understand it.
Emaciated and bereft of possessions, Shozaburo Takitani came back to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war ended. He discovered that his parents had died when their home burned to the ground in the great Tokyo air raid of March ’45. His only brother had disappeared without a trace on the Burmese front. In other words, Shozaburo Takitani was now alone in the world. This was no great shock to him, however, nor did it make him feel particularly sad or miserable. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he felt that, eventually, life had to turn out more or less like this. Everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was thirty at the time, beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had put on several years all at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.
Yes, Shozaburo Takitani had managed to survive one way or another, and as long as he had managed to survive, he would have to start thinking of ways to go on living.
Because he knew only one line of work, he hunted up some of his old buddies and put together a little jazz band that started playing at the American military bases. His talent for making contacts won him the friendship of a jazz-loving American army major, an Italian American from New Jersey who played a pretty mean clarinet himself. An officer in the Quartermaster Corps, the major could get all the jazz records Shozaburo Takitani needed straight from the U.S. The two of them often jammed together in their spare time. Shozaburo Takitani would go to the major’s quarters, break open a beer, and listen to the happy jazz of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, or Benny Goodman, teaching himself as many of their good licks as he could. The major supplied him with all kinds of food and milk and liquor, which were hard to get ahold of in those days. Not bad, he thought: not a bad time to be alive.
Shozaburo Takitani got married in 1947. His new wife was a distant cousin on his mother’s side. They happened to run into each other one day on the street and, over tea, shared news of their relatives and talked about the old days. They started seeing each other after that, and before long ended up living together—because she had gotten pregnant would be a safe guess.
At least that was the way Tony Takitani had heard it from his father. Tony Takitani had no idea how much his father, Shozaburo Takitani, had loved his mother. She was a pretty girl, and quiet, but not too healthy according to his father.
She gave birth to a boy the year after they were married, and three days later she died. Just like that. And just like that she was cremated, all quick and quiet. She experienced no great complications and no suffering to speak of. She just faded into nothingness, as if someone had gone backstage and flicked a switch.
Shozaburo Takitani had no idea how he was supposed to feel about this. He was a stranger to such emotions. He could not seem to grasp with any precision what “death” was all about, nor could he come to any conclusion regarding what this particular death had meant for him. All he could do was swallow it whole as an accomplished fact. And so he came to feel that some kind of flat, disc-like thing had lodged itself in his chest. What it was, or why it was there, he couldn’t say. The object simply stayed in place and blocked him from thinking any more deeply about what had happened to him. He thought about nothing at all for a full week after his wife died. He even forgot about the baby he had left in the hospital.
The major took Shozaburo Takitani under his wing and did all he could to console him. They drank together in the base bar nearly every day. You’ve got to get ahold of yourself, the major would tell him. The one thing you absolutely have to do is bring that boy up right. The words meant nothing to Shozaburo Takitani, who merely nodded in silence. Even to him, though, it was clear that the major was trying to help him. Hey, I know, the major added suddenly one day. Why don’t you let me be the boy’s godfather? I’ll give him a name. Oh, thought Shozaburo Takitani, he had forgotten to give the baby a name.
The major suggested his own first name, Tony. “Tony” was no name for a Japanese child, of course, but such a thought never crossed the major’s mind. When he got home, Shozaburo Takitani wrote the name “Tony Takitani” on a piece of paper, stuck it to the wall, and stared at it for the next several days. Hmm, “Tony Takitani.” Not bad. Not bad. The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last a while yet, and an American-style name just might come in handy for the kid at some point.
For the child himself, though, living with a name like that was hard. The other kids at school teased him as a half-breed, and whenever he told people his name, they responded with a look of puzzlement or distaste. Some people thought it was a bad joke, and others reacted with anger. For certain people, coming face-to-face with a child called “Tony Takitani” was all it took to reopen old wounds.
Such experiences served only to close the boy off from the world. He never made any real friends, but this did not cause him pain. He found it natural to be by himself: it was a kind of premise for living. By the time he reached some self-awareness, his father was always traveling with the band. When he was little a housekeeper would come to take care of him during the day, but once he was in his last years of elementary school, he could manage without her. He cooked for himself, locked up at night, and slept alone. Not that he ever felt lonely: he was simply more comfortable this way than with someone fussing over him all the time. Having lost his wife, Shozaburo Takitani, for some reason, never married again. He had plenty of girlfriends, of course, but he never brought any of them to the house. Like his son, he was used to taking care of himself. Father and son were not as distant from each other as one might imagine from their lifestyles. But being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal degree with a habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other. Neither felt a need to do so. Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.
Tony Takitani loved to draw, and he spent hours each day shut up in his room, doing just that. He especially loved to draw pictures of machines. Keeping his pencil point needle-sharp, he would produce clear, accurate drawings of bicycles, radios, engines and such down to the tiniest details. If he drew a flower, he would capture every vein in every leaf. No matter what anyone said to him, it was the only way he knew how to draw. His grades in art, unlike those in other subjects, were always outstanding, and he usually took first prize in school art contests.
And so it was perfectly natural for Tony Takitani to go from high school to an art college (at which point, without either of them suggesting it, father and son began living separately as a matter of course) to a career as an illustrator. In fact, there was no need for him to consider other possibilities. While the young people around him were anguishing over the paths they should follow in life, he went on doing his precise mechanical drawings without a thought for anything else. And because it was a time when young people were acting out against authority and the Establishment with passion and violence, none of his contemporaries saw anything of value in his utilitarian art. His art college professors viewed his work with twisted smiles. His classmates criticized it as lacking in ideological content. Tony Takitani himself could not see what was so great about their work with ideological content. To him, their pictures all looked immature, ugly, and inaccurate.
Once he graduated from college, though, everything changed for him. Thanks to the extreme practicality and usefulness of his realistic technique, Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. No one could match the precision with which he drew complicated machines and architecture. “They look realer than the real thing,” everyone said. His pictures were more accurate than photographs, and they had a clarity that made any explanation a waste of words. All of a sudden, he was the one illustrator that everybody had to have. And he took on everything, from the covers of automobile magazines to ad illustrations, anything that involved mechanisms. He enjoyed the work, and he made good money.
Shozaburo Takitani, meanwhile, went on playing his horn. Along came modern jazz, then free jazz, then electric jazz, but Shozaburo Takitani never changed: he kept performing in the same old style. He was not a musician of the first rank, but his name could still draw crowds, and he always had work. He had all the tasty treats he wanted, and he always had a woman. In terms of sheer personal satisfaction, his life was one of the more successful ones.
Tony Takitani used every spare minute for work. Without any hobbies to drain his resources, he managed by the time he was thirty-five to amass a small fortune. He let people talk him into buying a big house in an affluent Setagaya suburb, and he owned several apartments that brought him rental income. His accountant took care of all the details.
By this point in his life, Tony Takitani had been involved with several different women. He had even lived with one of them for a short while in his youth. But he never considered marriage, never saw the need of it. The cooking, the cleaning, the laundry he could manage for himself, and when work interfered with those things, he hired a housekeeper. He never felt a desire to have children. He had no close friends of the kind who would come to him for advice or to confess secrets, not even one to drink with. Not that he was a hermit, either. He lacked his father’s special charm, but he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. There was nothing arrogant or boastful about him. He never made excuses for himself or spoke slightingly of others. Rather than talk about himself, what he enjoyed most was to listen to what others had to say. And so just about everybody who knew him liked him. Still, it was impossible for him to form relationships with people that went beyond the level of sheer everyday reality. His father he would see no more than once in two or three years on some matter of business. And when the business was over, neither man had much of anything to say to the other. Thus, Tony Takitani’s life went by, quietly and calmly. I’ll probably never marry, he thought to himself.
But then one day, without the slightest warning, Tony Takitani fell in love. It happened with incredible suddenness. She was a publishing company part-timer who came to his office to pick up an illustration. Twenty-two years old, she was a quiet girl who wore a gentle smile the whole time she was in his office. Her features were pleasant enough, but objectively speaking, she was no great beauty. Still, there was something about her that gave Tony Takitani’s heart a violent punch. The first moment he saw her, his chest tightened, and he could hardly breathe. Not even he could tell what it was about her that had struck him with such force. And even if it had become clear to him, it was not something he could have explained in words.
The next thing that caught his attention was the way she dressed. He had no particular interest in what people wore, nor was he the kind of man who would mentally register each article of clothing that a woman had on, but there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed herself that it made a deep impression on him: indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed smartly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Totally different. She wore her clothing with such utter naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had wrapped itself in a special wind as it made ready to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman who wore her clothes with such apparent joy. And the clothes themselves looked as if, in being draped on her body, they had won new life for themselves.
“Thank you very much,” she said as she took the illustration and walked out of his office, leaving him speechless for a time. He sat at his desk, dazed, doing nothing until evening came and the room turned completely dark.
The next day he phoned the publisher and found some pretext to have her come to his office again. When their business was finished, he invited her to lunch. They made small talk as they ate. Though fifteen years apart in age, they had much in common to talk about, almost strangely so. They clicked on every topic. He had never had such an experience before, and neither had she. Though somewhat nervous at first, she gradually relaxed until she was laughing and talking freely. You really know how to dress, said Tony Takitani when they parted. I like clothes, she said with a bashful smile. Most of my pay goes into clothing.
They dated a few times after that. They didn’t go anywhere in particular, just found quiet places to sit and talk for hours—about their backgrounds, about their work, about the way they thought or felt about this or that. They never seemed to tire of talking with each other, as if they were filling up each other’s emptiness. The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. But she had a boyfriend she had been dating since high school. Their relationship had become less than ideal with the passage of time, and now they seemed to fight about the stupidest things whenever they met. In fact, seeing him was nowhere nearly as free and fun as seeing Tony Takitani, but still, that didn’t mean she could simply break it off. She had her reasons, whatever they were. And besides, there was that fifteen-year difference in age. She was still young and inexperienced. She wondered what that fifteen-year gap would mean to them in the future. She said she wanted time to think.
Each day that she spent thinking was another day in hell for Tony Takitani. He couldn’t work. He drank, alone. Suddenly his solitude became a crushing weight, a source of agony, a prison. I just never noticed it before, he thought. With despairing eyes, he stared at the thickness and coldness of the walls surrounding him and thought, If she says she doesn’t want to marry me, I might just kill myself.
He went to see her and told her exactly how he felt. How lonely his life had been until then. How much he had lost over the years. How she had made him realize all that.
She was an intelligent young woman. She had come to like this Tony Takitani. She had liked him from the start, and each meeting had only made her like him more. Whether she could call this love or not, she did not know. But she felt that he had something wonderful inside, and that she would be happy if she made her life with him. And so they married.
By marrying her, Tony Takitani brought the lonely period of his life to an end. When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he did was look for her. When he found her sleeping next to him, he felt relief. When she was not there, he felt anxious and searched the house for her. There was something slightly odd for him about not being lonely. The very fact of having ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again. The question haunted him: what would he do? Sometimes the fear would make him break out in a cold sweat. It went on like this for the first three months of their marriage. As he became used to his new life, though, and the possibility of her suddenly disappearing seemed to lessen, the fear gradually eased. In the end he settled down and steeped himself in his new and peaceful happiness.
One time the couple went to hear Shozaburo Takitani play. She wanted to know what kind of music her father-in-law was making. Do you think your father would mind if we went to hear him? she asked. Probably not, he said.
They went to a Ginza nightclub where Shozaburo Takitani was performing. This was the first time Tony Takitani had gone to hear his father play since childhood. Shozaburo Takitani was playing exactly the same music he had played in the old days, the same songs that Tony Takitani had heard so often on records when he was a boy. His father’s style was smooth, elegant, sweet. It was not art. But it was music made by the skillful hand of a pro that could put a crowd in a good mood. Tony Takitani sat and listened to it, drinking much more than was usual for him.
Soon, however, as he lent his ear to the performance, something in the music began to make him feel like a narrow pipe filling quietly, but inexorably, with sludge. He found it increasingly difficult to breathe, or even to go on sitting there. He couldn’t help feeling that the music he was hearing now was just slightly different from the music he remembered his father playing. That had been years ago, of course, and he had been listening with the ears of a child, after all, but the difference, it seemed to him, was terribly important. It was infinitesimal but crucial, and it was perfectly clear to him. He wanted to go up onto the stage, take his father by the arm, and ask, What is it, Father? Why is it so different? But of course he did nothing of the sort. For one thing, he could never have explained what was in his mind. And so he said nothing. Instead, he went on listening all the way to the end of his father’s set, drinking whiskey and water. When it was over, he and his wife applauded and went home.
The couple’s married life was free of shadows. The two never fought, and his work continued as successfully as ever. They spent many happy hours together, taking walks, going to movies, traveling. For someone so young, she was a remarkably capable housewife. She understood the virtue of moderation, she was quick and efficient with the household chores, and she never gave her husband anything to worry about. There was, however, one thing that did concern him somewhat, and that was her tendency to buy too many clothes. Confronted with a piece of clothing, she seemed incapable of restraint. In a flash, a strange look would come over her, and even her voice would change. The first time he saw this happen, Tony Takitani thought she had suddenly taken ill. True, he had noticed it before they married, but it started getting serious on their European honeymoon. She bought a shocking number of items during their travels. In Milan and Paris, she made the rounds of the boutiques from morning to night like one possessed. They did no touring at all. They never saw the Duomo or the Louvre. All he remembered from their trip was clothing stores. Valentino, Missoni, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Ferragamo, Armani, Cerruti, Gianfranco Ferré: with a mesmerized look in her eyes, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed after her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised numbers on his credit card might be worn down.
Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She kept on buying new clothes almost every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To hold them, he had several large armoires made to order. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Still there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room made over as a walk-in closet. In their large house, they had rooms to spare, and money was no problem. Besides, she did such a marvelous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony Takitani decided not to complain to her. Oh, well, he told himself, nobody’s perfect.
When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, though, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years. Any way you looked at it, she had too many dresses. He could not understand why she had to keep buying herself clothing like this, one piece after the other. She was so busy buying them, she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he would have to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.
He took the plunge one night after dinner. I wish you would consider cutting back somewhat on the way you buy clothing, he said. It’s not a question of money, I’m not talking about that. I have absolutely no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?
His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, You’re right, of course, I don’t need so many dresses, I know that. But even if I know it, I can’t help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it or not, or whether I have too many or not: that’s beside the point. I just can’t stop myself.
I will, though, try to cure myself, she said (adding that it was like a drug addiction). If I keep on going this way, the house is going to fill up with my clothing before too long. And so she locked herself in the house for a week, and managed to keep away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent each day in her roomful of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it. She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the piece on, and look at herself in the mirror, never tiring of the sight. And the more she looked, the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable.
She simply couldn’t stand it.
She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. I don’t need this much clothing. I have only one body to wear it on. She called one of her favorite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. That would be fine, madame, she was told; if you will bring them in, we will be glad to take them back. She was one of their very best customers, of course; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit on her card. She thanked them and hurried to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight down the highway to home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the pieces. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses for the rest of my life. But as she waited at the head of the line for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colors, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail. She could picture them as clearly as if she had them in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. Forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.
A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.
Tony Takitani was left with a room full of size 7 dresses and 112 pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep everything his wife had worn for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and had him take away at least the hats and other accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the huge walk-in closet, staring all day at the rows of dresses that filled every available bit of space.
Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 7, height approximately 161 centimeters, shoe size 22 centimeters, good pay, favorable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up to be interviewed in his studio-cum-office in Minami-Aoyama. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size. From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife’s, a woman in her midtwenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean, but they were definitely showing signs of age.
Tony Takitani said to the woman, The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies. That sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I’ve recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here, which is why I specified dress size and shoe size and height as conditions for employment. I know this must sound strange to you, but believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It’s just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. I’ll have to make small adjustments to the atmospheric pressure or whatever it is. I need a period of time like that. And during that period, I’d like to have you nearby wearing her clothing. That way, I’m pretty sure, it will finally come home to me that my wife is dead and gone.
Biting her lip, the young woman immediately set her mind to work. It was, as he said, a very strange request—so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife’s having died recently. And she understood the part about the wife’s having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she herself should have to work in the wife’s clothes in his presence. Normally, she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye. But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe losing his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn’t look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And finally, whatever the case, she needed work. She had been searching for a job for a very long time, and her unemployment insurance would run out the following month. Then she wouldn’t be able to pay the rent. And probably, too, she would never again find a job that paid as well as this one did.
I think I understand, she said. Though not exactly. And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But first I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size. Of course, said Tony Takitani, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place outside of a department store, and each dress was obviously a quality piece that had cost a lot of money. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding for no reason at all. It felt like sexual arousal, she realized.
Suggesting that she check the fit, Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few dresses hanging nearby. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She took one dress after another in hand and looked at it. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in its fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes. She could not stop herself from crying. The tears poured out of her. There was no way to hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing. Why are you crying? he asked. I don’t know, she answered, shaking her head. I’ve never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I’m sorry. She dried her tears with a handkerchief.
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to have you start at the office tomorrow, Tony Takitani said in a businesslike manner. Pick out a week’s worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you.
The woman devoted much time to choosing six days’ worth of dresses. Then she chose matching shoes. She packed everything into suitcases. Take a coat, too, said Tony Takitani, you don’t want to be cold. She chose a warm-looking gray cashmere coat. It was so light, it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.
When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife’s clothing room, closed the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.
These shadows had once clung to his wife’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life, and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away. What were they now but worn-out old dresses devoid of any meaning whatsoever? Their rich colors danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and epaulettes and lace and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the soundless sound of a million tiny winged insects. He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again like a lukewarm broth of darkness. It’s all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it’s over.
He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologizing. But how can that be? the woman asked, stunned. I’m sorry, but the situation has changed, he said. You can have the clothes and shoes you took home. I’ll give them to you, and the suitcases, too. I just want you to forget this ever happened, and please don’t tell anyone about it, either. The woman could make nothing of this, and the more she pressed for answers the more pointless it seemed. I see, she said finally, and hung up.
For some minutes, the woman felt angry at Tony Takitani. But soon she came to feel that things had probably worked out for the best. The whole business had been peculiar from the start. She was sorry to have lost the job, but she figured she would manage somehow or other.
She unpacked the dresses she had brought home from Tony Takitani’s house, smoothed them out, and hung them in her wardrobe. The shoes she put into the shoe cabinet by the front door. Compared with these new arrivals, her own clothes and shoes looked horrendously shabby. She felt as if they were a totally different type of matter, fashioned of materials in another dimension. She took off the blouse and skirt she had worn to the interview, hung them up, and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. Then she sat on the floor, drinking a cold beer. Recalling the mountain of dresses she had seen in Tony Takitani’s house, she heaved a sigh. So many beautiful dresses, she thought. And that “closet”: it was bigger than my whole apartment. Imagine the time and money that must have gone into buying all those clothes! But now the woman who did it is dead. And she left a roomful of size 7 dresses. I wonder what it must feel like to die and leave so many gorgeous dresses behind.
The woman’s friends were well aware that she was poor, so they were amazed to see her wearing a new dress every time they got together—and each one a sophisticated, expensive brand. Where did you ever get a dress like that? they would ask her. I promised not to tell, she would say, shaking her head. And besides, even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.
In the end, Tony Takitani had a used-clothing dealer take away every piece of clothing his wife had left behind. The dealer gave him less than a twentieth of what he had paid, but that didn’t matter to him. He could have let them all go for nothing, as long as someone took them away. Away to a place where he could never see them again.
Once it was emptied out, Tony Takitani left the room empty for a long, long time.
Every once in a while, he would go to the room and stay there for an hour or two doing nothing in particular, just letting his mind go blank. He would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of his dead wife’s shadows. But as the months went by he lost the ability to recall the things that used to be in the room. The memory of their colors and smells faded away almost before he knew it. Even the vivid emotions he had once cherished drew back, as if retreating from the province of his memory. Like a mist in the breeze, his memories changed shape, and with each change they grew fainter. Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence. Sometimes he could barely recall his wife’s face. What he often did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that his wife had left behind. He recalled her unremarkable face and her worn-out patent leather shoes. With that, her quiet sobbing rekindled in his memory. He did not want to remember such things, but they came back to life before he knew it was happening. Long after he had forgotten all kinds of things, including the woman’s name, her image remained strangely unforgettable.
Two years after his wife died, Tony Takitani’s father died of liver cancer. Shozaburo Takitani suffered little for someone with cancer, and his time in the hospital was short. He died almost as if falling asleep. In that sense he lived a charmed life to the end. Aside from a little cash and some stock certificates, Shozaburo Takitani left nothing that could be called property. There was only his instrument, and a gigantic collection of old jazz records. Tony Takitani left the records in the cartons supplied by the moving company, and stacked them up on the floor of the empty room. Because the records smelled of mold, Tony Takitani had to open the windows in the room at regular intervals to change the air. Otherwise, he never set foot in the place.
A year went by this way, but having the mountain of records in the house began to bother him more and more. Often the mere thought of them sitting in there made it difficult for him to breathe. Sometimes, too, he would wake in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep. His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have.
He called a used-record dealer and had him make an offer for the collection. Because it contained many valuable discs that had long been out of print, he received a remarkably high payment—enough to buy a small car. To him, however, the money meant nothing.
Once the mountain of records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.
—TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN