Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto Page B

was involved she became one very fierce woman, just the opposite of me. When she was a teenager, she was so into her boyfriend that she kept saying she was going to have his initials tattooed on her arm.
    “I think it’s a bad idea,” I told her. “It’ll narrow your range of options, right? You won’t be able to date anyone later on unless they have the same initial.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I mean, say you get a tattoo of the letter N for Nakazawa. It won’t make any sense if you date someone with no N in his name. What happens then? Sure, it’ll be just fine if you happen to end up with another N , but what if you fall in love with someone without any N s? You won’t be able to explain it.”
    “I don’t see why you’re thinking about these things. None of that is relevant! I’ll never go out with anyone else! I mean, isn’t it romantic to marry the first guy you ever date? I’m pretty sure it’s going to work out, you know.”
    “It’s never going to happen. Forget the tattoo.”
    We enjoyed these silly, late-night conversations, and we had them all the time. Back then our imaginations were so vibrant that, even in the absence of a skylight, we could sense how full of stars the sky was.
    At first, the membrane I felt around me when I thought of Kuni would dissolve when I cried, washed away by the hot stream of my tears. But now I had stopped crying. That’s how hard I was struggling, body and soul, to accept the situation. I remained enclosed in that membrane—the sense of my sister’s absent presence—all the time.
    “Where’s my mom?” I asked Sakai.
    I had left home to live on my own, and now I was in graduate school studing Italian literature. During the past several weeks I had suddenly started doing a lot of part time work, because it had occured to me, after my sister was hospitalized and the possibility arose that she might end up as a vegetable, that I might not be able to rely on my parents for money anymore. I also needed a way to distract myself. My days passed in a cycle of trips to the hospital, time spent with my sister, all-night jobs at bars, going to school, taking naps... and I was hardly eating at all. As a result, I learned that all you have to do is change your daily routine, and you start to accumulate an amazing amount of money. It began to seem as if I might even save up enough to cover the cost of my studies in Italy.
    With all that going on, I hardly ever went back to my parents’ house anymore, though I did keep going to the hospital. I talked to my mother on the phone every day, in addition to seeing her at the hospital. But even so, I couldn’t even imagine the depth of her pain. She looked as if she might have some kind of attack herself. Whenever I went to the hospital, she was always there in my sister’s room, reading a magazine, washing my sister’s thin body, moving her around to prevent bedsores, or talking earnestly with a nurse. Externally she seemed very calm, but you just had to be standing nearby to sense the storm that was raging inside her.
    “She said she had a cold or something,” Sakai replied.
    I found it easy to talk to Sakai, and I generally used informal speech with him, as if he were a close friend my own age, though in fact he was already past forty.
    And he had an unusual job. He was a master in a particular school of tai chi with a center of his own where he taught its philosophy and practice. He was the only person I knew who had such a weird occupation. But he had written a book, and he did have students, and I had even heard of people coming from abroad to study with him. Until recently, I hadn’t even realized that people could make something like that into a successful business.
    I liked Sakai. I had liked him ever since I first set eyes on him. His unusually long hair, the strange sparkle in his eyes, the difficulty of what he taught, and the unexpected ways he reacted to things—his whole air branded him as an