A Quiet Place Read online

  “Got it. But you really shouldn’t be worrying about work at a time like this.”

  There was pity in Yagishita’s voice.

  “No, no. It’s fine. It’s my job, after all. I have to hand over the reins in a responsible manner. I can’t be seen to get distracted by personal matters.”

  “But your wife has passed away. It’s completely different.”

  “I suppose so. But I still have to make a distinction between personal and professional matters. After I leave, the director general is going to be all alone, and that’s not going to make him look good at all.”

  “Yeah, well, I suppose you’re right, but —”

  “Anyway, could you do that for me?”

  “Sure. No problem. Have a safe trip home!”

  Asai stopped walking for a moment and leaned to whisper in Yagishita’s ear.

  “What do you think about the girl sitting across from Mr Shiraishi? Do you think anything’s going to come of that?”

  Yagishita looked stunned. Apparently, when it came to his bosses, nothing escaped Asai’s attention.

  “Mr Asai. You’re not worrying yourself about that sort of thing at a time like this, are you?”

  It wasn’t until much later that Asai finally began to recover from the shock. Rattled around by the movement of the overnight train, he lay awake and began to think. Where had Eiko been when she’d had the heart attack? He’d forgotten to ask.

  2

  Following Eiko’s funeral, Asai observed the seventh-day Buddhist memorial service, but once that was over the house felt empty. It’d be a long time before everyone would get together again. There’d be the next memorial on the first anniversary of her death, but Asai wasn’t sure how many of Eiko’s relatives were likely to turn up. He and Eiko had no children, so it felt as if the family line had ended with her death.

  Asai and Eiko’s marriage had lasted seven years. They’d married a year after Asai’s first wife had passed away. He’d been thirty-five, and she eight years his junior. At twenty-seven, it was Eiko’s first marriage. The matchmaker told him that she’d been very picky early on about who she’d accept a marriage proposal from, and that gradually her chances of finding someone had faded. When they first came face to face, Asai had guessed that was true. She wasn’t all that great-looking, but he was attracted by her cheerful smile.

  Asai had expressed a strong interest in Eiko, perhaps because his first wife had been rather plain-looking. However, the matchmaker didn’t bring him an immediate acceptance of his proposal. Eiko had hesitated. He hadn’t been sure if it was something to do with her age – twenty-seven was late for a first marriage – or if it had been a problem for her that it was his second. Asai also knew he wasn’t exactly a great looker himself; he’d never been popular with the ladies. The only thing really going for him was the stability of his job as a civil servant, but even that didn’t pay a great salary.

  Finally, after keeping him in suspense for a good while, Eiko had agreed to marry him. Asai loved her. His second wife was much younger and more immature than his first, and he treated her more like a favourite child. Sometimes the age difference felt a lot closer to a dozen years.

  Eiko, for her part, rather enjoyed being spoiled by her affectionate husband. It wasn’t uncommon for her to spend two or three days at a time lying on the sofa, claiming to be too tired to do any housework. Asai never complained. He’d go out shopping and do all the cooking and cleaning himself.

  Whenever she was feeling fatigued, Eiko wouldn’t let Asai anywhere near her. She’d never been particularly into sex. This didn’t mean she wasn’t affectionate to her husband – she just wasn’t very assertive in bed. It was a little disappointing to Asai, but it didn’t stop him from adoring his young wife.

  Eiko was very sociable and loved to spend time with friends. This aspect of her personality contrasted strongly with how quiet she was at home. She had two completely different sides. Asai often wondered if she was bored staying at home with him. She certainly came to life whenever she went out somewhere.

  Mostly she spent time with women she’d known for years, and friends of those friends. At the beginning they’d all studied traditional Japanese ballads together. Somewhere along the line they’d quit those classes, and switched to playing the shamisen. Next it had been Japanese-style painting. Most recently, Eiko had been studying haiku with a woman poet in Suginami Ward. One of her friends who had been a pupil there for some time had invited her to join the class. She didn’t seem to be able to stick with things for long, but Asai supposed, as a result, her life was never monotonous.

  Happily, the haiku infatuation seemed to have stuck. Eiko had already been studying it for two years, with no sign of giving up. She even seemed to have a small amount of talent for it, and her poems were often praised by her teacher and fellow pupils. From time to time, she’d have a poem chosen for publication in an amateur haiku fan magazine. Eiko’s teachers had praised her shamisen playing and her painting in the past, but actually seeing her own work in print had encouraged her more than anything. Being average at something was depressing; to be top of her class put her in great spirits. She always enjoyed comparing her results to other people’s. She had cleared her desk at home of all her paints and brushes, and for a while now it had been covered in books – collections of haiku poetry, glossaries of terms, dictionaries.

  Apparently, the women who wrote haiku were either very old or very young; there weren’t many in between. Women around Eiko’s age – in their mid-thirties – were usually housewives with two or three children and found it difficult to get away, so Eiko and three or four of her friends were the only ones of that generation who attended the meetings.

  It was about two or three years ago that Eiko had turned to her husband and asked, out of the blue, “Do you think I’m sexy?”

  Asai had asked if someone had told her she was, to which she’d replied that a fellow haiku poet had told her that she was very sexy – not in any vulgar way, but that she had a kind of glamour about her. She’d clearly been delighted.

  “Was it a man or a woman who told you that?” Asai was very conscious of the fact that there were far more men than women in her haiku circle.

  “Of course it was a woman! I never talk to the men about anything but poetry. There’s no one who’d say anything like that to me. But this woman said that if she could see it, then it must be obvious to men too.”

  Because Asai was around her day in day out, he hadn’t really noticed, but when Eiko had told him this he’d seen what she meant. The lines of her figure had softened and rounded. She’d always been charming, but as she approached her mid-thirties that sweetness had changed to a more mature sexiness.

  “Ugh. I had a bad experience today. One of the women in my haiku circle told me she’d always assumed I was a bar hostess or something. She’d heard from one of my friends that I wasn’t, but found it hard to believe. Is that how people see me? I’m going to have to start wearing frumpier clothes from now on.”

  But all the frumpy outfits in the world wouldn’t have disguised her sex appeal; they’d have simply served to highlight the sexiness beneath the surface. To be honest, it had nothing to do with the clothes – it was her body. What had always been her sociable and open behaviour now came across as a little flirty. Asai saw it after this conversation, even in the smallest gesture.

  They say a woman in her thirties is in the prime of her life, thought Asai. It was only natural that her body would change. This exact topic had come up when Asai had been out drinking with his colleagues after work. One of his colleagues had claimed that there was nothing natural about a thirty-something woman who started to look sexier; he believed her increased sensuality was achieved through experience. The rest had agreed. There was only one way that a woman’s sexuality could mature, and that was by having more sex.

  But Asai had been reluctant to agree. Sex with his own wife couldn’t possibly be responsible for her increased voluptuousness. Not o
nly was it very infrequent, but there was nothing wild or adventurous about it either. He knew from frank conversations over drinks that his own sex life was only about a tenth of the frequency of his colleagues’. Assuming this group was an average cross section of the general public, he’d realized he was way, way below the norm. Eiko just wasn’t interested.

  To make matters worse, about two years previously, Eiko had suffered a heart attack. The unexpected pain in her chest had abruptly drained all the colour from her face, and she’d broken out in a cold sweat. She’d made it to the hospital in time, and the doctor had diagnosed a mild coronary. After a week in hospital, she’d made a full recovery, but ever since then she’d been even less keen on Asai’s attentions in bed. She’d read in some medical journal that a second heart attack was likely to be fatal, so she’d resolved to take extra care. She’d said it was important to keep as calm as possible and avoid any kind of shock. That was another reason she’d taken up haiku.

  The doctor had told Asai that although it was important to be cautious, that what Eiko had read in the medical journal was “textbook” advice as it were, she didn’t really need to follow it to the letter. She’d had a heart attack, but it was a mild one, and being too neurotic about a recurrence was inadvisable.

  Asai agreed that being neurotic was a bad thing. And probably that was the appeal of the world of haiku poetry; it was very good for her spiritual health. However, after the heart attack, she’d completely refused all physical contact, which, to be honest, she’d never been particularly enthusiastic about in the first place.

  And that was why Asai had disagreed with the opinion that experience was what caused a woman’s sexuality to blossom. Sex had nothing to do with it. He believed that a woman’s body went through natural changes as she aged. But he couldn’t express these views to other people. If he did, he’d have to cough up the truth about the woeful state of his own sex life. He realized there was no other way to make his case, but he wasn’t prepared to be that open. In the end, whenever the conversation turned to this topic, he kept a poker face.

  It was curious, though – and he supposed that every case was different – that because his wife’s sex drive was so low, his own body and needs seemed to have adjusted to hers. He didn’t seem to have any strong sexual desires any more. He could easily have paid a woman to have his own needs met, or even started an affair, but he’d never been particularly interested. He supposed it was because he and Eiko were perfectly in tune.

  But besides being in tune with Eiko, there were two other reasons he wasn’t interested. The first was that he was the kind of person who valued money above everything. He understood that it was vital to a stable lifestyle. He believed that being without savings was the equivalent of standing on the precipice of hell. This way of thinking came from being poor and having to work himself through college. There was no way he was going to waste a single yen of his hard-earned money on a few moments of pleasure with a prostitute. Anyway, it wasn’t as easy as it had been in the past to visit a red-light district and pick up a woman. These days you had to know the right people. If you didn’t, then you had to go to a bar at least three or four times and do your best to persuade some woman you met there to sleep with you or have her introduce someone to you. Not only was this a colossal waste of time and energy, it ended up being expensive. And it might have been okay when he was young, but it was hardly the behaviour of a respectable forty-something. What if he ran into some young guy from the ministry? Imagine the embarrassment! He’d be a laughing stock. And it might end up damaging his prospects at work.

  Asai was immensely proud of being section chief at the Ministry of Agriculture. That was the other reason he didn’t want a colourful private life. There were plenty of people who had played around, valuing their private life above work, and they’d run into trouble with the powers that be. That had been the end of promotion for them. Some had even quit the ministry altogether, and after that they’d never been able to find a decent job.

  It wasn’t that the ministry was the pleasantest work environment, but he mostly kept his complaints to himself. There were times when he felt extremely irritated at the elite-track types, known as “career civil servants”, but this was Japanese bureaucracy, and there was nothing rational about it. If you were going to be that enraged at the system, you might as well quit. To rebel was futile.

  Rather than wasting his time banging his head against the bureaucratic wall, Asai carefully planned his own route to success. With the right care and attention he’d make division chief. There were a few people with the same academic background as himself who’d become director. And once in a blue moon someone like him actually made it to director general.

  To be fair, he wasn’t aiming quite that high, but he at least meant to be division chief before he retired. And so he did his job diligently. He’d set out to become an expert in practical matters, to be something the elite-track director generals and division chiefs couldn’t. This was his only means of competing with the highly educated, career-track types.

  When he said “compete”, it wasn’t exactly a contest. He simply made sure he was their go-to person when it came to practical matters. The elite tended to see their position at the ministry as a kind of temporary stopover on the highway to greatness. They had no idea about the day-to-day practicalities of the job. In fact, as they were only resting briefly on their journey, they didn’t even bother to familiarize themselves properly with the requirements of the job. They’d skate by, believing they’d grasped the fundamental principles, barely slowing down as they blindly rubber-stamped everything that came their way.

  Asai was the loyal assistant, the faithful aide to these higher-ups, though admittedly he wasn’t equally helpful to everyone. He was very adept at sniffing out whether someone was likely to rise high in the ranks or not. He’d learned this both from experience and from studying the facts.

  Whenever Asai did a job for someone who didn’t seem to have a very bright future, he appeared attentive enough, but his heart wasn’t truly in it. There was no going above and beyond his duties. He’d surreptitiously watch and wait for the boss in question to run into difficulties, while cleverly making sure no one noticed that he was being deliberately malicious. This way, he got some of the resentment and frustration out of his system.

  However, everything changed if he spotted a superior on the career fast-track. It didn’t matter how mediocre a boss he might be, Asai would treat him with utter devotion, on occasion performing amazing feats on his behalf and allowing his boss to take the credit.

  Division chiefs would become directors, and directors would become director generals. In the future, one of these bosses might well return to the department to be his direct supervisor once again, and then, Asai reckoned, he would be justly rewarded. Along with the increase in salary from each promotion would be a larger severance cheque and a much higher pension.

  Asai poured all of his energy into his job at the ministry, so the dismal state of his marital relations with Eiko barely bothered him. Things had always been like that, and now she had her heart condition. He was used to taking care of her.

  And then, with his wife’s sudden death, Asai seemed to have lost his way.

  He had bawled as his wife’s body was laid in its coffin, and when the time came for it to pass through the little window into the crematorium furnace, his father-in-law had had to pry him off. Do all husbands who lose their beloved wives feel this way? Asai had wondered as he wiped the tears from his eyes. Does everyone feel like this? He’d surprised himself. He wasn’t normally the type to show his feelings.

  Surely not all of those tears were caused by a fleeting rush of emotion – he must have loved Eiko deeply. Their seven years together may not have been the richest of married lives, but having her die on him reminded him how much he’d cared about her. He was older and had seen a lot more of life, had often treated her like a child, but he was now reminded with a jolt that they’d been equal part
ners in marriage.

  He was still working through these emotions when one Sunday, around ten days after Eiko’s death, her sister came by. Miyako’s husband, a technician at an oil company, was away on a two-month overseas business trip, looking into future sites for development. Miyako usually stayed with her parents while he was away, and when Asai was absent on business she’d always stayed with Eiko at her place.

  “You must be feeling lonely,” she said to Asai, as she lit an incense stick for her sister and offered a prayer in front of the family altar. She hesitated a little as she took a seat by Asai.

  “I’ve still not completely come to terms with the fact that she’s dead,” Asai replied truthfully. “I wasn’t there when she died. And it didn’t even happen at home.”

  Asai had been at the dinner party in Kobe when Miyako had rung to let him know that Eiko was dead. He’d never been able to separate in his head the content of that phone call with where he’d been when he took the call. He’d been there in Kobe as assistant to Director-General Shiraishi, and that was where his mind had been when he’d heard the news. To be more precise, he hadn’t been quite sure at that point whether Shiraishi was a dead cert for future glory. His wife was from a famous political dynasty, but her family had no strong connections in the ministry’s personnel office. However, there were rumours that Mrs Shiraishi was well connected with a certain influential politician. No one knew for sure whether her husband was destined to become the top bureaucrat or whether he would be transferred out of the ministry mid-career to be an industry adviser elsewhere. Asai knew he had to be extra attentive just in case, so he’d been very tense that night. Shiraishi had been born to a privileged family and raised as the favoured son, meaning he could be too distracted and laid-back. Asai had also heard that he could be very unpredictable in his moods, so he’d been particularly alert the whole evening.