“So have we come here to cry?”
Her tense expression showed that my teasing hadn’t gone down well.
Invasion of Happiness
Two cocktails as red as Mizuki’s T-shirt were plonked on the table just as someone else came in. A hairy guy with a strangely long face took his place at the farthest table from us, which was just a few feet away.
The barman with the quiff bent to fiddle with some buttons beneath the bar. Suddenly, a TV screen over the bar lit up with the YouTube logo and the titleSad Songs Channel. “Lost Song” by Ólafur Arnalds, a neoclassical piece for a weepy violin and repetitive, depressing piano came on. A static image of a frozen flower filled the screen.
I took a sip of my cocktail, which turned out to consist of tomato juice and gin, and then said to Mizuki, “I’m not surprised you want to find a precipice and jump to your death if you come to this place often. How come you like it?”
“Namida no Café consoles me.”
I took a sip of my Stigmata Martyr as I waited for Mizuki to elaborate. Curled up on the sofa, her expression was one of existential weariness.
“When you’re not going through the best time of your life, and all you want to do is cry, there’s nothing more offensive than an invasion of happiness. You go into a department store and they put on jolly canned music for shoppers who are laughing and shouting like lunatics. Even in the bar where my uncle goes . . .”
“Whatever you say, that song about the eels is terrible.”
“There are some that are much worse than that, believe me.” A faint smile flickered across her face. “What I like about this place is that you don’t have to pretend to be happy or cover your ears, or hate anyone. The songs are in tune with my spirit which, basically, is at rock bottom. Here, I feel as if things are the way they ought to be.”
“The mood of our spirit changes like the seasons of the year. Not even sunny days or extreme cold last forever, but I understand that it’s difficult to see that when you’re really down in the dumps.”
She gave me a bored look. I could see that my words were like water off a duck’s back, so I tried a different tack, hoping to find out why she was so unhappy.
“What was your husband like?”
Mizuki shook her head slowly, as if waking up from a dream.
“Richard was a good man, maybe even too good. He was so true to his principles that I could always work out what he was going to do next. He became totally predictable.”
“So did you leave him because of that?” I was looking for some connection with my own case. “Were you bored?”
“It’s much more complicated than that . . . Let’s sayhe was so kind, attentive and understanding that he pushed me into being the opposite. It was sort of like yin and yang. I ended up being his antithesis.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” She sighed. “That’s why I came back to Japan. I hope the distance will help me figure it out.”
We lapsed into silence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Somehow we’d gone about this backward. I knew the conclusion of the story, but not the story itself.
Then again, she knew nothing about my little drama, except that I’d been dumped by my partner.
Maybe there was no need to go into details. Perhaps it was enough to know that we’d both failed in love and had ended up in this Bar of Tears, although I no longer had any desire to cry.
As if she’d guessed what I was thinking, Mizuki suddenly said, “I’ve had enough of this bar for today. Do you want to come to my place?”
“That wouldn’t be right.” I said. “Don’t you live at your uncle’s house?”
“I do, but he lives downstairs and I live upstairs. We have separate entrances. What are you frightened of?”’
Geiko, Maiko and Danna
Without knowing exactly how it happened, I found myself sitting in a taxi next to Mizuki. I was a cocktail shaker of ominous sensations and desires more difficult to separate than the ingredients in the Stigmata Martyr I’d just had.
As the taxi climbed to an outlying neighborhood in the foothills of one of the mountains surrounding Kyoto, I glanced at this woman who was pulling me into her private abyss.
Any man in my situation would have tried to spend an unforgettable night with her but, for better or worse, I was full of reservations. I went through each one in my head as the taxi left the city center behind and entered the residential neighborhoods.
