But again, what is it that so frightens all these men? It is neither a particular group of individuals, nor anything else you can really put your finger on. It haunts them even at home, in their time for resting and relaxing with their wives and children. It enters even into their dreams and threatens them in their sleep. It’s what brings them the nightmares that terrorize them in the middle of the night.
Sometimes when I gaze around at the vacant chairs and desks, and at the hat stands with their empty hangers here and there, I find myself getting all choked up. Everything I see takes on the image of someone who works there, and seems to have so much to tell me.
“My old lady came on to me again last night with tears in her eyes, begging me, please, please, it’s okay if my pay is low and we’re always on the verge of going broke, just watch my temper and don’t do anything rash and never forget how important my work is. She cried and pleaded with me on and on like that, you know, and hey, it really made me stop and think.”
Pressed up against one desk is the chair of the man who spoke these words to me. Every time I look at that chair, I remember how he started in with a simple remark about making ends meet at home and wound up with this doleful lament. I remember it as clear as day—the tone of his voice and his embarrassed smile and every
thing. . . .
There Mr. Aoki’s story came to an end.
His story about the bar had been an eye-opener as well, but Mrs. Aoki now asked herself whether her husband had ever said anything like this about his anxieties at work before. Little had she imagined that he was going off to work feeling like this every day. How could she have missed it all those years? What in the world had they talked about in a decade and a half of living together in the same house as husband and wife?
Even if her husband never got home until midnight and then had to hurry off to work as soon as he got up the next morning, how could they have spent that many years together and never spoken about a single important thing? Even with his long hours, they’d always made a point of going somewhere as a family on Sundays. But what had her husband spoken of, and what had she asked him about, in the time they actually spent together? Never once had it entered her mind that her husband might hold such feelings about his work at the office. She’d always simply assumed that he stayed out late every night because he enjoyed a good time, and she’d thought nothing more of it than that.
He had tended to be out late every night from the time they first got married, so apparently that image of him had become etched in her mind at the very beginning. Their regular Sunday outings compensated for the lack of any kind of family life from Monday through Saturday, and she had always thought it more satisfying that way than if he came home earlier during the week but then had to go in on Sunday as well, leaving her to while away another dull day at home.
Having listened to her husband’s story tonight, she now understood why he never came straight home after work even when he had no clients to entertain. It was the deep anguish he felt about his life as a working man. And she understood, too, that he hadn’t felt he could find comfort for that anguish at home. Facing his wife and children apparently only increased his pain, while the women at the bars and cabarets let him forget it.
In that case, what had she been to her husband all this time? she suddenly wondered. If their marriage had not been one of fulfillment and trust and mutual support, then what had she been doing all this time?
But she also wondered: if her husband had never told her about the anxiety and pain he experienced in his job, didn’t that just go to prove that he had been unburdening his heart to someone else all along? And wasn’t it that very someone who was really to blame for their present troubles?
When her husband had told her about the sisters at the bar, the image of a woman had come before her like a flash of revelation. She shuddered at the terrifying reality of that image and tried hastily to push it from her mind, but it would not leave her.
At first she had found it a little bewildering to have her husband get up in the morning only to stay home all day, but by the time a week had gone by she began to think she preferred it this way.
If only their family could always live like this, she thought, without her husband having to go off somewhere to work every day! If only they’d been born in ancient times when this was how everyone lived! Having nothing to do, the man grabs his club to go on a hunt. He tracks down his prey, leaps upon it, and battles it to its death. He carries his trophy home on his shoulders and hangs it over the fire as his woman and the children gather about to watch it cook. If only their lives could be like this—how much happier they would be!
Instead, every morning the man dons his suit and rides the commuter train to a distant workplace, and every night he returns home sullen and spent. Wasn’t this the very prescription for an unhappy life? To Mrs. Aoki, it had certainly begun to seem so.
In the darkness, her husband seemed lost in thought.
“You can’t get to sleep?” she asked.
“No, no,” he said in haste, “I was just starting to drift off.” After a pause he added, “I guess it’s because of that long nap I took.”
“Shall I do some magic that’ll help you sleep?”
She brought her face directly before his and edged slowly closer until their eyelids almost touched. It was not magic; it was a special caress she’d invented. With their eyelashes touching, she began blinking her eyes, stroking his eyelashes with the up and down of her own. It brought an odd sensation—like the rapid-fire chatter of two tiny birds absorbed in conversation, or like the last stage of a Japanese sparkler when the tiny ball of fire on the tip starts shooting snowflake sparks in every direction.
In the darkness, she went on blinking her eyes. The motion of her eyelids comforted and soothed, but she could not keep them from also questioning, reproaching.
Mr. Aoki decided to start going to work again.
His vacation of ten days was over. He’d had to call an end to it when the boys began to ask, “How long do you get to take off?”
He also had to consider the suspicious glances some of the neighbors had begun to cast his way. One of the ladies had even asked Mrs. Aoki some rather prying questions at the grocery.
Secrets like this had a way of spreading with astonishing speed. Though none of his former colleagues lived nearby, you could never tell where one of the neighbors might hear something through the grapevine.
But his more immediate concern was the boys. Since he had told them that he was on vacation, he could not simply go on lolling about the house forever; and in any case, he needed to start looking for a new job. Thus, Mr. Aoki decided to resume leaving the house every morning at the same time as he used to leave for work.
The first day, after her husband had gone, Mrs. Aoki suddenly felt limp with exhaustion. In her mind she saw the figure of her husband walking aimlessly through the city streets beneath the late summer sun. The pangs of her husband’s anguish as he trudged uneasily along the bustling street, ever fearful that he might meet someone he knew, seemed to pierce her own heart.
She imagined him gazing up at the screen in the darkness of a movie theater where he’d gone to escape being seen. Or she imagined him sitting on a bench at a department store, watching the mothers who had brought their children to play on the rooftop playground.
But then these images abruptly broke up, to be replaced by a vision of her husband quietly climbing the stairs to an unfamiliar apartment building. Her blood