The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto

That was how I saw what I was doing. I guess my attitude was sort of casual.
    When I compared myself to Sayuri, who was so incredibly dedicated and so earnest in her dealings with the kids, I felt sort of bad.
    The truth was, it didn’t make any difference to me whether my mural was knocked down or admired or whatever. And if the Infant Development Center closed, as long as the people there were good and smart, I felt sure they would carry on their work somewhere else.
    Maybe I was afraid of seeing anything as absolute. I wanted to keep moving, like a stream, and I wanted to go on watching everything from a distance.
    That’s how I was. I felt close to people, but I didn’t have any friends I could really share my life with, our hearts melting together. Something always failed to communicate.
    Nakajima was the first true friend I’d ever had, in my whole life … I really believed that. He was extremely frail, and yet there was something in him I could trust.
    I saw myself reflected in our relationship, as if in a mirror. And I knew that I wasn’t wrong. And I was at peace.
    All along, just because I lived away from my mom, I thought I’d achieved independence, but now that she was gone I finally realized how much, in my heart, I had depended on her.
    I never asked my mom for advice, but whenever I was going through an unsettled period like I was now, I’d call her up to talk, or go back to visit, just to see her face. Now that she was gone, I realized these little things had given me a core to hold on to—or maybe brought me back, for better or worse, to the place I came from. I wasn’t even sure what that meant … whether that place was something that had existed before I was born, or not.
    When I was young, I used to turn and look back at my mother’s face to make sure I knew where I was in relation to her; now, I had to take stock of my situation by myself. Sure, I could see myself through Nakajima, but the second I glanced away I lost it. Parents are absolute; he wasn’t.
    I’d watched my mother dying for so long that now I could hardly remember how, back when she was healthy, her spirit used to shine. All that came to me now was the agonizing sound of her final breaths, the smell of her dying body that had filled the hospital room, things like that. The sense of powerlessness, knowing that my mom was suffering alone, and that in her universe I was no help at all—I could recapture that feeling, but nothing else.
    I read in some book that if you try to hold people back too much when they’re dying it keeps them from being reborn as a Buddha, and that had stuck with me, somehow, maybe more than it should have, so I tried hard not to cry too much, and kept telling my mom how much I appreciated all she had done for me. Now all I can do is think how stupid I was to act like that. I should have cried my eyes out. I should have thrown myself wailing at the coffin the way my dad did, and made a huge commotion. Forgotten everyone watching, the mourners and what they’d think, and just been myself.
    If I had done that, I bet my mom wouldn’t have come in my dream the way she did that night, worried because she saw that part of me was holding back, unwilling to fall completely in love with Nakajima.
    About two weeks after Nakajima first stayed over, he asked me for a favor.
    “I want to go see some old friends, but I’m scared to go alone. Will you come?”
    We hadn’t had sex again since that first time, but he’d been staying over at my apartment every night. He always made sure to remind me that he’d recalculate the utility bills.
    My mural-painting days wouldn’t start until the following week, so the timing was perfect.
    Since I had so much time on my hands, I’d been cooking all kinds of dishes using a huge package of imported gourmet ham that my dad had sent. Fried rice with pineapple and ham, ham and steak, steamed rice with ham, and so on.
    I tried so many different ham recipes that finally