I Want to Leave This Old Harbor Town

"Wine and Coffee, I only want one cup. Thinking of the past, I drink a second." I would hum along softly while doing my homework. At moments like that, my dad would stop polishing his plaster dental molds and glare at me. "Little girls shouldn't learn songs like that." I would obediently fall silent, though inwardly I disagreed. I knew Aoi Kawashima's mother next door did not sing songs with what he called "class," either. "A Dancer's Tears," "Wine and Coffee," "A Wordless Ending"... If you wanted a more elegant phrase for them, you could call them decadent songs. But compared with the dry rasp of my father's tools scraping at his models, I liked that lazy, languid singing much better. Besides, everyone on the street was a neighbor and our lives crossed all the time. I never had to pay when I went next door to get my hair washed; when Aoi came to our dental clinic for an extraction, we could slip her a few extra cotton balls. Why look down on people in private? When my father saw I was almost done with my homework, he would have me help him mix the material for plastic teeth, one portion of powder and one cup of liquid. I stirred them together with a stainless-steel spatula, and the harsh smell would immediately fill the clinic. My father had been running his practice on this shopping street by the harbor for years. Whenever he had time, he would hold up a model and show me things: how many roots this tooth had, what shape that one should be. He clearly meant for me to inherit the trade. He had raised me alone on the income from this little clinic, and I knew this was probably my fate. There was nowhere to run from it; all I could do was accept it in silence. I envied Aoi Kawashima. Her mother was also a business owner, but the salon she ran was far more dreamlike. The rooms were all painted pink. At night she would thoughtfully switch on a small red light. Every time I passed the doorway I could see the proprietor's long legs crossed at the knee, and I would think of my mother, who had died too young. Aoi's mother had soft hands. When I went over to have my hair washed, she would sink all ten fingers into my unruly hair and knead my scalp hard, asking in that lovely voice whether it still itched. I always said it itched a little more, just to make her keep massaging me. Only I knew that what itched was not my scalp but my heart. Her hands seemed magical. She was only rubbing my head, but somehow they warmed my whole body. I was jealous that Aoi had such a beautiful, gentle mother who loved to sing. She could take for granted every touch and embrace from her. We were the same age. Before I had even finished elementary school, I was already wearing thick glasses. Aoi, on the other hand, had those beautiful big eyes. That had everything to do with our parents' different ideas of how to raise a child. While I sat at my little desk squinting over my homework in the dim light, Aoi stood before a mirror combing her long seaweed-dark hair or spinning around to show off a new dress.

My father had partitioned off a little room inside the clinic for me to sleep in and do my homework, but children are born loving play, and Aoi and I were no exception. She often abandoned the soft bed in the salon and came over to fight me for the dental chair. I would press the buttons and send it up and down, changing the angle of the backrest, and Aoi would laugh so hard she hiccupped, saying it was more fun than a roller coaster. At times like that I felt that being a dentist was not so bad after all. You got to operate such marvelous machines, provided you could bear black and yellow tartar, the reek of rot, blood, and foam. 1997 was an important year. Besides all the events splashed across the news, several things happened that mattered greatly to me. First, my father had a terrible fight with Aoi's mother. To let me prepare in peace for the high-school entrance exams, he did the unheard-of and shut the clinic for half a month. Afraid of losing regular customers, he even changed the material he used to seal root canals, switching from zinc oxide, which lasted only a week, to the more durable zinc phosphate. Aoi also had exams to sit, yet she still came looking for me as usual. My father turned her away as tactfully as he could. Seeing the wounded look on her face, I could not bear it, so I wrote her all kinds of postdated promises and said that after the exams I would let her sleep in my dental chair for a whole month. That finally sent her away satisfied. None of that was much in itself, but when the opening bars of "Wine and Coffee" floated in from next door, my father could not bear it anymore. He put down his medical textbook and stormed out to quarrel with Aoi's mother. I sat at my desk doing geometry, listening in terror as their shouting match grew wilder. My father said her vulgar pop songs kept me from concentrating. She snapped back that the noise from his machines was enough to drive anyone mad. Before long they were far from the original subject, throwing around words like "brothel" and "little red light." What surprised me was my father's ferocity. I had thought he was only a man who made dentures. I had not known he could offend the neighbors for my sake and produce such a dazzling variety of curses. What I could not understand was why the lamp in the salon next door meant Aoi was no longer allowed to come play with me. That fight must have been the explosion of grudges built up over a long time, because from then on our two families became strangers. I no longer dared go next door to wash my hair and often soaked myself from head to toe doing it on my own. Aoi, meanwhile, would clutch one swollen cheek and refuse to step even one pace into our clinic. Then there was the matter of getting into school. Even after all that shouting, my four-hundred-degree glasses had not been for nothing. I got into the county's college-prep high school without any real danger, one step closer to the future my father had drawn for me. The strange thing was that Aoi got into the same school. The news hit me hard. So all the desperate studying I had done was nothing worth being proud of after all. My father snapped the alcohol lamp shut and said it was different. Aoi's mother had spent tens of thousands of yen and gone groveling to all kinds of people. I said that in that case I would forget dentistry in the future and open a salon like Aoi's mother instead. Rather than breathing in wax, alcohol, and plastic all day, I could spend my life with the fragrant smell of shampoo. My father turned grim and said I was never to go down that road. I did not resist his obsession much, because the most important thing that year was that I met Yuma Kamiya. "You're one fearless girl," Yuma said to me, astonished. In biology class we had to dissect frogs. The roomful of students all trembled and could not bring themselves to begin, while I took up the scissors, cut open the frog along the middle of its belly, peeled back the skin on either side to expose the organs, then stimulated the nerves and observed the reflexes. By the time the others were still shoving one another and shrieking, I had already washed the instruments clean and thrown the remains into the collection bin. When I went back to my seat, I saw Yuma Kamiya. This beautiful boy, who always seemed to look down on everyone, was actually smiling at me. He said he had already finished the lab report and did not mind letting me copy it. I did not stand on ceremony. I took it and began copying at once. He sat there beside me, studying me from beneath those long lashes until my face grew hot, and then he said, "How about we partner up from now on?" Lab classes might cultivate all-around skills, but they counted for little in university entrance exams and were not worth spending too much time on. I was quick with experiments; he wrote reports effortlessly. It seemed a win-win arrangement, so I nodded. After I finished copying and handed it back, he still did not leave. He looked at me with puzzled curiosity. "But...aren't you really scared?" In that moment I silently thanked my father. Because of him I had seen patients with mouths full of blood, heard them howl in pain, and smelled scorched gum tissue. Compared with that, cutting up one frog was absurdly easy. But I did not tell him all that. When you like someone, you do not want to turn into just one of the boys. You have to hold something back, keep a little mystery. I suppose I had learned that by osmosis from Aoi. Time dulled the memory of the fight, and at school there was no way for us not to run into each other. Our friendship eventually resumed. Aoi, who had been born with the makings of a beauty, wasted none of it. She quickly became the most eye-catching girl in our class, then one of the most conspicuous girls in the whole school. When we went to the cafeteria, boys would trail after us furtively, impatient for a closer look at her beauty. If Aoi so much as turned around and gave one pout of mock complaint, those boys would seem to fall under a spell, rooted to the spot, unable to cry or laugh, humble as dirt. Come to think of it, I noticed Yuma in the first place because of Aoi. One day in the library, she suddenly grabbed me and pulled me in front of her. In a mysterious whisper she said, "Mao Asakura, lend me a hand. There's someone looking at me." I followed the direction she indicated. The boy she meant was Yuma Kamiya. At that moment he was leafing through a book three shelves away and not looking over at us even once. The evening light edged his outline in pale gold, and from then on the figure of that fresh young boy was branded into my heart. Later, when Aoi heard about the frog-dissection incident, she sounded unconvinced. "He doesn't like you, does he?" I hurried to explain. "How could that be? He just wants to make use of me." Aoi gave a doubtful little "oh." Suddenly I felt sad. Since when had I become the maid beside the princess, forever having to deny every possible miracle? Around that time porcelain crowns came into fashion. The nouveaux riches discovered that gold teeth looked tasteless and all flocked instead to crowns closer to the color of natural teeth. Every week when I went home, I saw my father busily grinding crowns for patients. The cheap ones were only a few hundred yen, the better ones cost in the thousands. He had good technique, and when he met a wealthy client, his silver tongue would persuade the patient to do half a mouthful, or even a full set, of porcelain crowns. Gradually he made more and more money and started thinking about expanding the clinic. It was also around then that I came to understand certain things that had once baffled me, such as what the red lamp in front of Aoi's salon really suggested and why those men always came only after dark for their so-called hair washes. I had seen the man who made it possible for Aoi to study at our school. He was an old customer of the salon, with a beer belly and a bald patch. When I was younger I always wondered what good it did to wash the few strands of hair left on his head. Only later did I understand that it was a lamb sold under a goat's sign. On the nights he came, Aoi was always sent over to sleep at our dental clinic.

My father was clever. He knew how to use every connection he had to grow his business. No matter how busy he was, he still made time to attend parent meetings and hand out his business cards among the mothers and fathers. One day Yuma came running over to me and said, "So your family runs a dental clinic. No wonder you're..." I was already embarrassed by my father's flamboyant self-promotion, so I looked sour at once, but Yuma smoothly added, "Actually, one of my teeth needs straightening. Maybe your dad could help?" I was startled. "No need, surely. Aren't your teeth straight enough already?" "You don't know about the one in the back..." Yuma actually leaned past my face so I could look into his mouth. I instinctively frowned, then relaxed. How could anyone be so perfectly made? Even his breath was fresh, carrying the faint scent of tea. He nearly overturned my entire opinion of dentistry. That weekend, when I brought Yuma to our clinic, the door of the salon next door happened to open. Aoi Kawashima, with her long hair and wide eyes, came out to see that balding client off, wearing a professional smile as she told him to come again next time. So she was just like me: when school was out, she had to come home and help with the family business. While I mixed materials for my father and passed him instruments, she was probably washing or blow-drying customers' hair. I wondered whether her mother had demanded that she inherit the salon someday as well. It had been a long time since I had gone next door to cadge a free hair wash and massage from Aoi's mother. My father gave me enough spending money that I now washed my hair at the larger, brighter shops near school. Objectively speaking, Aoi's family salon had its flaws too. The towels always smelled faintly damp and rotten, and all that pink decor was much too suggestive. That day, when Aoi finished seeing off the customer and caught sight of Yuma and me, she froze on the spot. A look of panic I had never seen before flashed across her face. Without even greeting us, she turned and slammed the door behind her. Because Yuma was my classmate, my father gave him a twenty-percent discount. I mixed the materials at the side while my father glued each stainless-steel bracket onto Yuma's teeth and fixed the curved wire in place, all the while explaining the foods he would have to avoid. Yuma nodded, then suddenly turned to me and said, "Mao Asakura, you'll remember all of this for me, right?" I was a little intoxicated by the note of dependence in his voice, but I answered coolly, "They're your teeth. Do as you like." When he left, I walked him to the station. As if casually, he asked, "Is the place next door...that kind of place?" I put on an innocent face and asked, "What kind of place?" He glanced at me and said nothing. He must have known that braces made speaking awkward. He talked less than before and did not dare move his mouth too much, but I did not think it looked bad at all. When I got home, my father brought up expanding the clinic again. More and more patients were coming, and he could not handle them alone anymore; he would need to hire extra staff. On the right side of us stood a well-known supermarket. If he did not buy the salon on the left from Aoi's mother, he would have to move to an entirely new location. Thinking of what Yuma had said, I suggested that we relocate. My father was reluctant. After all, he had been here for years. He went next door and knocked, probably to discuss buying the place. I took Yuma's plaster dental model into my room and could not stop looking at it. A few days later, I got a message from my father at school saying that expanding the clinic would cost too much and he would postpone it until after I got into university. I did not dare say anything against it. At some point Aoi began drifting away from me. She no longer waited for me at lunchtime so we could go to the cafeteria together. Remembering the nights when we had fought over the dental chair and whispered into the dark, I felt a little wistful, but I soon got over it, because Yuma started eating with me instead. Even though girls read romance novels and boys passed around strange discs, there were still unspoken rules about boys and girls mixing. Most of the time there was a clear line: boys at one table, girls at another. In that atmosphere, Yuma and I still ate together with reckless courage, and we had a good excuse. "Mao Asakura, can I eat leeks? Will they stain the brackets? Can I eat beef? Will it get caught in the wire? Can I eat...this?" Each time Yuma asked me in that pitiful voice, I ignored the murderous glances around us, crunched away at all the foods he was forbidden to touch, and answered through full cheeks, "Better not, unless you want to wear them for another six months."

That bald man treated Aoi rather well. He often came to the school gates in the role of a guardian and took her out for lavish meals. His car was parked conspicuously outside, and the more worldly girls would point and whisper what model of BMW it was, unable to hide their envy. Accompanied by that middle-aged man with the bald patch, Aoi, long-haired and long-legged, would walk coldly through the crowd of boarders to the iron gates beyond and make her escape from the cafeteria's cauldron meals. I could not understand what she was thinking, putting her favor on display so deliberately. In any case, I had seen that man pawing at her, and I could also tell how much she hated him. Because I lived near her, some classmates would ask me questions. "Is that fat man Aoi Kawashima's dad?" A few newspapers had run features on the red-light alley, and I was terrified of being dragged into any association with it, so instinctively I cleared myself at once. "Oh, Aoi and I aren't that close. Why don't you ask her?" Whenever I remembered how, as children, the two of us had once promised to save up and buy a big house together, I hated my own hypocrisy. But then again, one hand cannot clap by itself. Was not Aoi equally indifferent toward me now, even carrying a kind of cold resentment? Yuma came in for adjustments about once a month. Under my strict supervision, his orthodontic treatment went well. When the braces finally came off, he smiled with such dazzling brightness, his teeth straight and white, that for a moment I almost wished he would never have them removed. Yuma could not wait to take me out for chicken curry and rice. We sat by the window in a restaurant downtown, and at last I no longer had to play the nanny who forbade him this and that. Perhaps out of sentiment, he ordered a whole tableful of dishes he had been missing. Halfway through the meal he suddenly asked, "Mao Asakura, when you grow up, will you become a dentist like your father?" I let out a sigh. "Other than that, I don't know what else I can do." He frowned. "If you have a choice, I'd rather you didn't." "Why?" I could not understand where that prejudice came from. Yuma fell silent at once. He ate several bites before saying, in a muffled voice, "When I think of you leaning close to other boys and looking into their mouths, I feel...uncomfortable." I blushed all the way to my ears. To hide it, I laughed loudly and said, "What's so bad about that? I'd get to openly toy with handsome boys while they lie there helpless." Yuma reached across at once and pressed his hand over mine. "No. For the rest of your life, you don't get to toy with any man but me." His eyes were dark and damp, and he said it so possessively that my breathing stopped for an instant. All my confidence vanished. With difficulty I said, "But...are you sure that person would really be me? If someone else had been the first to dissect the frog that day, or if you'd gone to another clinic for braces and met another dentist's daughter, then would you..." I knew I was talking nonsense. That was why Yuma looked at me with that expression, as if he had wandered into clouds and mist. I tried to straighten my tongue and explain myself, but another table suddenly erupted. A middle-aged man was gripping a young girl's hand. She struggled wildly, and then he slapped her. It was a crisp, ringing slap. Everyone in the restaurant looked over, including Yuma and me. It was that bald man, and the girl with him was Aoi Kawashima. Aoi saw us too, and all of us were equally shocked. I was the first to choose indifference. Yuma glanced at me as if asking a question. I hardened my heart and deliberately changed the subject. The bald man and Aoi were still tangled up while the restaurant staff went over to mediate. Yuma hesitated. "Do we really not need to do anything?" I kept my spine ramrod straight and did not move until the staff managed to persuade them to leave. Only then did I slowly let my shoulders loosen.

That weekend I deliberately went home earlier than usual, intending to persuade my father in earnest to move the clinic. Yuma came with me to check how his retainer was fitting. I had not called my father beforehand. I even bought fruit on the way, wanting to surprise him. But the clinic was shut. When I opened the outer door, I heard a strange commotion inside. Suspicion flashed through me, and I pushed the inner door open without another thought. On the dental chair were two people tangled together. I saw my father's graying hair and Aoi's mother with her legs raised high. So that was another reason for the choice he had made. Blood rushed to my head. I do not know what I shouted. Then I ran all the way to the little bridge two streets away and vomited over the garbage bobbing in the river. What was this if not filth hidden under the surface, especially when one of the people involved was your own father? A moment later someone came running up to support me. It was Yuma. I tried my best to smooth my face back into order. "Sorry you had to see that." Yuma looked at me, his brow faintly furrowed. "Mao Asakura, you don't have to force yourself. Grown-ups have their own world." My father's calls came chasing me back to school. He said I should forgive his long loneliness, appreciate all his years of being single, and bless him for having found an emotional refuge. I listened to him pour out his heart while doing homework. Originally I had wanted to ask why, of all people, he had chosen Aoi's mother, but in the end I did not. I told him in a flat voice that from that moment until the university entrance exams were over, I would stay in the dormitory and not come home, so I could save time. Yuma was very concerned about my family situation, but whenever he touched on the subject I changed expression at once. Eventually he learned better than to prod that minefield, and did not even dare mention coming to the clinic for checkups anymore. At school I still inevitably ran into Aoi. Looking at her face, so much like her mother's, made my anger flare all over again. Like her mother, Aoi had eyes that were too big and pouches too deep beneath them, so that she looked faintly dissipated even without eye shadow, though in men's eyes perhaps that was a different kind of allure. At least one thing consoled me: her grades were mediocre. There was no way she would get into the same university I did. I was determined to leave this foul old harbor town behind. That bald man continued to flaunt himself, driving that flashy car to the school gates to take Aoi out for lunch. In the space of a single noon hour, he could buy her enough designer clothes that she returned to the dorm carrying several branded shopping bags without effort. One day Yuma and I were walking down the avenue of plane trees, light mottling the ground beneath us, when I said abruptly, "I listened to you. I'm not going to study dentistry after all." "Mm," Yuma said, nodding without asking more. Smart of him. The moment I thought of dentists, my mind still leapt back to that unbearable scene. I think I had never really liked the profession in the first place, and now I had one more reason. Perhaps out of guilt, my father stopped laying out my future for me the way he once had. When he called, he asked only whether I was sleeping well and whether I had enough money. I answered everything in a few clipped words, without an extra particle of feeling. In truth I had slowly calmed down, and I was gradually becoming able to understand my father and Aoi's mother. To understand was one thing; to accept was another. That would take far more time. The night before the university entrance exams, it occurred to me on a whim that I had not heard from my father in a while. He was probably afraid of distracting me and lying awake worrying like all the other parents. I took the initiative and called home. To my surprise, it was Aoi's mother who answered. "Where's my father?" "Oh, he's already asleep. He said if you called, I should wish you luck on the exam." Years of singing those torch songs had damaged her vocal cords. Her voice was slightly hoarse, yet it carried the self-satisfied tone of a mistress of the house. Despair flooded me. I thought that my father had lost even the last of his sovereignty and turned completely into a henpecked man. I remembered how, in the past, no matter how late I stayed up revising, he insisted on staying awake too, cutting me fruit or sometimes slices of beef, then getting up early anyway the next morning to grind soy milk and wake me. Those days would never come back. That night I did not fall asleep until very late, caught a chill, and sat the Chinese exam the next day with my head heavy and blurred. Yuma could tell something was wrong with me, but I did not tell him the truth. I just joked about silly things from the exam hall, grinning and chattering so one less person would have to worry.

That evening the sunset was as red as blood. The exams were finally over. When I walked out of the school gates, a crowd outside was already selling answer sheets. I bought one and stood there checking it while waiting for Yuma. At that moment Aoi appeared and asked in a strange tone, "Why aren't you going to see your father?" Irritated, I replied, "He's got plenty of fox spirits throwing themselves at him. Why would he need his daughter fussing over him?" Aoi's eyes widened and her lips parted a little. "You don't know? Your dad's in jail. The clinic's been shut down." I stared at her blankly. How could that be? Hadn't business been booming, with expansion just around the corner? "You really didn't know?" she said. "Some of the porcelain crowns your dad made years ago had problems with the materials. One of the patients got a chronic illness and sued him. He had to pay out a fortune." My legs went weak. I had spent the last few months sulking and staying away from home, never imagining that something this serious had happened. Hollowly I heard myself say, "But even if there was something wrong with the materials, that shouldn't land him in jail." Aoi blinked. "My mother said they also found problems with his medical qualifications, substandard sanitation, and the use of underage labor without nursing credentials. Illegal practice carries criminal penalties." She was still beautiful and smooth-skinned, just as she had been when I first saw her years ago, like an angel fallen into the dust of this world. And now that angel was calmly using one cruel technical term after another. All at once a blinding clarity filled my mind. How would an ordinary person know something like unlawful child labor? That kind of thing usually came from someone close. Could it be that an acquaintance had informed on him? Aoi did not deny it. Her face darkened. "Mao Asakura, I've always hated your family. We're both in the business of seating customers in chairs and offering services, so why did you get to act so superior?" I stared at her, unable to speak. From the very beginning, then, the tone and the look of contempt in my father's face had wounded that little girl deeply. Then came the quarrel before the high-school entrance exams, the humiliation her mother endured to keep the salon, each brick stacking on the next until the load became impossible to balance. And maybe Yuma had been the final straw. To defend her own little world, that girl had begun to scheme with all her strength. That scene I had witnessed in the restaurant had been arranged by her in advance. She knew Yuma and I would go home at that hour and had deliberately called her mother to say school would run late that week. In order to ruin the thing she believed I was proudest of, she had even been willing to sacrifice herself, enduring that bald man's advances while secretly backing the patient who eventually brought my father down. Despair washed over me. "Aoi...why go this far?" Aoi gave a bleak smile. "Don't make yourself out to be so innocent. I'm the biggest victim here, aren't I? Was it my fault to be born into a family like this? And yet you were always doing everything you could to distance yourself from me. At that ice-cream shop, didn't you stop Yuma too? Didn't you leave me there to fend for myself? And all those things you said about my mother. Mao Asakura, your life is so good. You had a rich father. Even if he's in jail now, he paid into an education fund for years, and it's about to mature. You'll never have to worry about living. You even tricked Yuma Kamiya into falling for you. But me? If I want to go to university, I have to keep flattering that disgusting fat man." Just then someone honked across the street. It was her disgusting fat man, come to pick her up. In an instant Aoi's face changed back into one of angelic innocence, and she walked briskly toward her patron. It isn't like that, I wanted to say. I could not let her leave just like that, so I ran straight after her. In my fury I did not notice the car coming or hear Yuma's cry until a pair of hands shoved me hard toward the roadside. Then there was the heavy sound of a body hitting the ground. I will always remember that evening, the sunset red as blood.

Love is pain no one can willingly seek out. When the scores came back, I had not done well. My original goal was beyond reach. Without Yuma Kamiya, the promise we had made to go to university together lost all meaning. With no one to discuss it with, I circled one of the regional medical colleges at random and wrote it down as my first choice. In the end, that was where I went. My application had been too conservative. My score exceeded the admission line by nearly a hundred points. To my surprise I was awarded an entrance scholarship worth tens of thousands. During the vacation I went to see my father. Prison had aged him by at least ten years. His spirit was broken, and the hand holding the telephone receiver shook so badly it looked like something from a textbook case of Parkinson's. Holding up a wax tooth I had carved in practical class, I said to him through the glass, "Thank you, Dad. Compared with the other students, my professional courses are so much easier. Look at this tooth I carved. Every one of them got above ninety. Dad, even if I don't love this profession, I can still learn it well. Someday when I open a dental clinic, I won't make you mix materials for me. You just have to smell that plastic scent and hear the whir of grinding, and it'll be enough to comfort you." I do not know how much of that he really took in. When I turned to leave, all he could do was look at me with reluctant eyes. On the way back to school, someone in a little shop by the road was singing: Come on and be happy, there's still so much time; come on and fall in love, there's still so much longing; come on and wander, there are still so many directions; come on and make trouble, there is still so much splendor. Listening to that lazy female voice, I felt as though I were hearing it from another life. All at once the tooth in my mouth, the one that had been so carefully protected since childhood and had never once developed a cavity, began to ache unbearably.