House of Ghosts
“I’ll have hot pot, if you’re offering. But eating alone’s no fun, so why don’t you join me?”
What I’d said was “Can I treat you to a meal as a thank-you for all those times you had my back at work?”
And that was what Iwakura said in response.
I wasn’t quite sure how to take an invitation like that from a boy who had his own apartment.
This is Iwakura we’re talking about, I thought. He probably doesn’t mean anything by it. He’d already mentioned his building was nearby.
And in any case he said it so casually, and with such an artless expression, that my heart didn’t give a single flutter.
Iwakura had an intriguing mixture of bright and dark about him, like a cloudy midwinter sky, which had somehow made me hold back from starting to like him. I couldn’t see him giving me that heady feeling, the rush that makes you want to burst into a run—the things I was looking for in young love.
“I’ll come over and cook,” I said, and we picked a date, matter-of-factly.
We were by the bench under the tall zelkova on our college campus.
I didn’t have a lot of friends, and the few that I did have were too busy with their part-time jobs to come to class much. It was the kind of thing that happened at low-tier private colleges like ours. So Iwakura and I had naturally become close simply from being two loners on campus.
We’d met when I was covering some shifts for a friend at a local place that served drinks and food where he worked behind the bar.
After that, we’d stop to chat or eat lunch together whenever we saw each other on campus.
His parents ran a famous bakery in our town that sold high-end cake rolls. He’d told me how, as the only child, he was doing everything in his power to save up enough money to avoid having to take over the family business after graduation. I believed him. There was a desperation about him that spoke of the lifetime of baking cake rolls that awaited him by default unless he forged his own path. He went about his part-time job like someone who had his work cut out for him.
“Cake rolls! What’s not to like? They’re great,” I said, having never turned down a cake roll in my life.
“I don’t mind the cake rolls, but my mom’s practically perfect. Friendly, thoughtful, hardworking . . .” Iwakura said.
It was true that his mom was well known in the community for being welcoming and attentive. People ended up buying cake rolls at their bakery just because of how she made them feel.
“I . . . I think I’m quite a nice person,” he said.
“I agree.”
His gentle spirit and his good upbringing were obvious to me even just from our walks together. If we were in the park and the trees swayed in the wind and made the light dance, he would half-close his eyes and look blissful. If a child tripped and fell, he’d frown, and when the parent picked the child up afterward he’d look sympathetic and relieved. There was a candor about him I noticed in people whose parents had given them something unconditional and absolute growing up.
“If I stay home, with my family, for the rest of my life, I’ll just get more and more nice.”
“And that would be a problem because . . .”
“It’s fine, except the way I see it, it’s not real. Anyone can be kind when they’ve got enough money and free time, and no problems, don’t you think? What I’m saying is, if I stay at home, that’s all my niceness will ever be. And either something dark and unpleasant starts building up inside me, or I’m stuck with that superficial niceness until I die. I’m lucky to be easygoing by nature, and I want to make sure that’s what I feed. Not the dark stuff.”
“That’s why you’re so desperate to save up and leave?”
“Maybe it’s something like that. I’m just trying to look one step ahead. Otherwise I’ll end up doing cake rolls without ever having known anything different. And then I’d really be stuck,” Iwakura said.
The college we went to was expensive.
In my case, I ended up there because my parents were both busy at the restaurant around the time I was born, and enrolled me in the kindergarten of the school attached to the college, where I’d come up through the system ever since.
My family ran a fairly well-known yoshoku restaurant in the next town over, which had been started by my grandparents. It was the kind of place listed in all the tourist guidebooks, where a family would stop by for a meal out, or a single office worker would go for a nice dinner after work when they didn’t want to stretch for a French restaurant.
I wanted to run the place someday, so in truth I was more interested in learning to do that than in getting my degree. The restaurant’s menu was unchanged from my grandparents’ time, and I’d been trained from a young age to make things like omurice, pilaf, and demi-glace. All I really needed to do before I could take on the restaurant was to get my chef’s license.
My elder brother had no interest in food, and had moved out on his own while he was still in high school. Now he had a busy and successful job at an advertising agency.
Iwakura’s determination to do something—anything—other than go into the family business reminded me of my brother. Perhaps that was another reason I felt so close to him.
Back when we both still lived at home, my brother would often stay up late to vent his frustrations to me.
My brother loved people, and had an enormous sense of curiosity. He was always looking for excitement and loved surprises above everything. He was totally unsuited to a life of routine in which you needed to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same way, week in, week out. Only doting parents could have imagined he’d be the right person to run a restaurant.
“Leave it to me,” I always told him. “It’ll never work out for you.”
On those nights, my brother would frown and try to talk himself into it, saying things like But I’m better than you at working with my hands, and I like the idea of not being stuck behind a desk, and You know how happy it would make Mom and Dad . . .
He was also the kind of person who liked to hold on to things he had, especially if other people wanted them.
After he moved out, all we’d see of him was when he’d drop by and stay for dinner before leaving again. He seemed to be enjoying his freedom and not planning on settling down anytime soon, and the chances of him coming back to run the restaurant when the time came seemed slim.
This evidently gave my parents something to chew on, and when I said I wanted to do it, they seemed to think I might be saying it out of a sense of obligation. To avoid making the same mistake they had made with my brother, they decided that I should be encouraged to spread my wings and see a little of the world first. It seemed to me they’d been seriously shaken by finding out that my brother, who they’d always assumed would succeed them, had disliked the idea quite so much all along.
So they sent me to college to give me time to think it over, and a chance to change my mind if I wanted to.
In any event, my feelings about it stayed exactly the same, so staying in school was turning out to be more of an opportunity to gain some life experience.
For me, being at the restaurant while my mom and dad grew older and eventually took on the roles of my old grandma, who had passed a while ago, and my grandpa, who still hung around like a mascot and visited with some of our oldest regulars when they came in, seemed like the surest and most important thing in my life. I didn’t understand why my brother had been so against the idea that he had to move away from home to escape it.
Ever since I was young, I’d always stuck with things—maybe even taken them a little too far. I’d kept up my abacus until recently, and could still beat anyone at mental arithmetic. I’d been going to calligraphy lessons since I was a kid, and doing pottery as a hobby for more than a decade. I was even about to take a trip with three childhood friends to the same hot spring in Iwate we’d been to every year for the last eight years.
This was why I didn’t know why Iwakura was so determined to turn his back on his family’s bakery, whose position seemed as advantageous as their cake rolls were delicious. If he had his heart set on a different path, then maybe—but he had no plan. I couldn’t understand what he was trying to do.
Because he wasn’t the type to be forthcoming with the details of a situation, or his thoughts and feelings, it just sounded to me like he was giving up a sure thing in favor of pie in the sky.
That said, being from families that had been serving customers for generations, we had a lot in common, and understood each other well.
Even if they didn’t weigh too heavily on us, we couldn’t help but be aware of the responsibilities we’d been born into.
On the day we’d chosen, I bought the ingredients for the hot pot and went to Iwakura’s apartment for the very first time.
He’d told me that the building, which was already slated for demolition, stood on land owned by his uncle, who had agreed to let him live there in the meantime for a rent of five thousand yen a month. But somehow this hadn’t prepared me for what I found.
The old wooden building was dilapidated, with broken windows, a crumbling outside staircase, and holes in the floors where the boards had rotted through.
I stopped in amazement. Take a look at this, I thought. He lives here all on his own? I could never.
Now that I’d seen the state the place was in, I understood why he was the only one living there.
I felt like I’d discovered the source of his peculiarly translucent darkness, the air of loneliness and heaviness that hung around him wherever he went.
I tightened my scarf, looked up at the clouded sky through the chilly winter air, and gulped. Something made me think I wouldn’t be coming out of there the same as I went in.
I went up to the corner apartment on the second floor, and Iwakura opened the old sliding door and told me to come in.
“This is some place!”
“Isn’t it? This room used to be the landlords’ apartment, so it’s bigger than the others.”
He smiled.
It was true. Belying the impression I’d gotten from the small sliding door, the apartment easily contained two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a respectable-sized tatami room in the back. The ceilings were high, and the rear windows looked out onto a park where the evening chimes were just that moment ringing out from loudspeakers.
If you forgot that the other units were pitch dark and abandoned, it was a surprisingly bright and pleasant home.
“So, do you have a pot for this hot pot?” I asked.
“I do. And a picnic stove.”
“It’s going to be a simple dish of chicken meatballs, Chinese cabbage, and glass noodles. Are you happy with udon to finish?”
“This is a treat.” Iwakura smiled.
“You know I’m much more used to cooking Western-style food. I can do that blindfolded.”
“Of course, I can imagine. That’s what I should have asked for, if I’d thought about it. I just really wanted hot pot.”
“This way it’ll be a good challenge for me, ...
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