Desire

Books | Project Ninety | Training | Writing

3 January 2022 - Tokyo

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I'd been avoiding reading the book for some time now. She slipped it into my coat pocket not long after slipping into my bed. Not that I didn't want her to, it was just wholly unexpected while her husband slept in the other room. We'd been friends for several years now walking a tightrope of unconsummated desire. Playing games. Sharing our troubles and our little joys about our respective lives. Neither of us was from Tokyo originally, both ending up here through the little accidents of life that seem to chart everyone's course despite believing in our own agency.

It'd been at a the dinner party of a mutual friend where we'd first met. Or was it a board game night? It's funny how certain people show up in your life and slowly become important, going from nothing to everything. You can't quite place the steps of the changing relationship because it happens so naturally. With us it wasn't like a flower burst open suddenly to release a crescendo of beauty into the world. It was more like the constant drip of slightly calcified water in a cave; slowly but surely it built up a stalactite on the ceiling and a stalagmite on the floor until they met in the middle.

Nothing really changed that quickly after the funeral either. (My first wife had died suddenly in a car accident.) I hadn't know her long at that point but I thought it was sweet she came to the funeral. Just her though. Not her husband. But I guess some couples don't travel everywhere together. I felt guilty for a long time after that I hadn't gone with my first wife on that last fatal trip of hers. It wasn't that far or long of a trip. I just didn't particularly like the friend she was visiting and begged off claiming an overabundance of work. And then she was gone and I had to see the annoying friend at the funeral anyway. Strange thing a funeral. A bunch of people who may not necessarily like or even know eachother getting together because of their common connection to a person who isn't there.

She started inviting me to more dinner parties after that, maybe because I didn't get out much being single again. And without a wife to drive home I often ended up on a couch or guest bedroom having opened that second or third bottle of wine as I chatted late into the night.

I'll never forget breakfast the morning after there with her husband and young son. I'd never had children myself, so I always felt a little uncomfortable around them. She was still glowing in her thin frame underneath that loose dress, busy making sure her son ate has eggs. And so I was left chatting with her husband about the latest games in the English Premier League of football. I was never much of a fan, preferring the much more mainstream Japanese sport of baseball, but he avidly followed Norwich City. This led him to go out to bars to watch games that started hours before most people got up in the morning. Having a husband that came home drunk before noon on the weekends probably wore on her, but she didn't show it. I tried not to stare at her while her husband droned on about league standings and potential relegation and a hundred other things that I didn't care about at that moment as much as the way her neck smelled.

In the old Gene Wilder version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after Willy Wonka tells Charlie that he's handing the factory over to him, he asks Charlie a question: "Do you know what happened to the little boy that got everything he ever wanted?" On Charlie's face you can see that he, like us in the audience, expect the answer not to be a good one. Then Wonka zings us with "He lived happily ever after." Kitsch, isn't it? For some reason it always comes to mind when I get exactly what I wanted. Probably because it's never like that afterward.

Eventually I found a girlfriend and we got married and had two kids and a nice apartment and careers and all the little things that build up a life. The water of life directed buildup elsewhere and the stalactite stopped penetrating into the stalagmite. I still saw her and her husband at the occasional dinner party. It was never awkward, just past tense. I don't know if she told him, but I can't imagine he didn't know. Some people see only what they want to though. Some years later I pulled the old jacket out of my closet and discovered Haruki Murakami's Desire tucked into it and remembered she put it there. That was perhaps the reason I'd put the jacket into the back of the closet. But I suppose it doesn't matter any more than the rest of this story.

I first discovered Haruki Murakami many years ago when I used to run marathons, reading his book on running, and more lately some of his other short stories. He is also a Tokyo man (native though) and writes in a simplified, first person style. In this book is even a little Kafkaesque fanfic where we find Gregor Samsa woken up no longer a bug but not quite remembering what it means to be human. Imitation to express admiration which is, I suppose, the thrust of the current tale as well.