rin is alive

23 august 2024

She cracks open the now unlocked door and gingerly tiptoes over the threshold, her wide eyes darting around the room and gradually adjusting to the darkness. A certain something lingers in the air; a haze that makes it difficult to see much of anything. In the absence of her sense of smell, she realizes, the odor of chaos makes itself visible in another way, hanging over everything like a veil.

The tiny apartment is a complete mess. A menagerie of different cans and bottles lie on the floor, along with piles of discarded, dirty clothes and assorted DVD cases. On the table, a laptop sits open with its screen turned off; beside it is a tin plate serving as a makeshift ashtray. The remains of cigarettes pile atop one another and spill over the sides. Pressing the laptop’s power button reveals the end credits of Truffaut’s 400 Blows. 

The room now faintly illuminated with an unnaturally blue light, she gingerly makes her way over to the bed. Pulling aside a mound of blankets, she can make out the silhouette of an emaciated figure in a 1972 Winter Olympics t-shirt. She jumps back with a start, trying to scream; but no sound escapes from her horrified mouth.

The person on the bed is lying face down, unmoving. Gripped by terror, she quickly grabs their shoulder to turn them over. To her surprise, they seem to weigh nothing at all - their body offers almost no resistance to being turned over. Now she can see their face: it is a girl. She can be no older than nineteen. Her face is so calm that she might even be sleeping. 

Now she stares, unblinking, studying the deceased’s features until they coalesce into sharper and sharper detail, becoming more and more familiar, until her greatest fear can no longer be avoided...

Rin’s life might be described by some as ‘unmoored.’ 

As he fights off the last vestiges of sleep and slowly sits up in his little bed, he can’t seem to remember the dream he just had. But almost out of instinct, he inhales as hard as he can. Immediately the scent of yesterday’s laundry, left unwashed and strewn all over the floor, hits his nose like a tidal wave. 

“Shit,” he mutters to himself, standing up and wincing as his joints crack. Inhaling again, he takes in the hints of beer and cigarette smoke and who knows what else. Nearly retching, he strides over to the window and shoves it open, breathing in once more: fabric softener, the scent of flowers, that distinctive and jubilant scent that can only be described as the morning sun.

And he realizes now that he can hear, too: the gentle rumbling of a faraway train, the bell of a bicycle, the laughter of children on their way to school. 

It is another morning. Rin is alive. 

Safe in this knowledge, he washes his face, quickly shaves, and worms his way into a dress shirt. On his way to the train station, he stops by a vending machine for a can of coffee. Now and then he looks around or fishes around in his pockets as if he’s forgotten something. 

Rin works part-time at a publishing agency. The pay is fine, his boss isn’t too demanding, and the job itself is easy enough. They don’t particularly specialize in anything - fine for Rin, who doesn’t really prefer one genre of book over another. Usually every other day, Rin’s boss will call him up to the office for a manuscript to edit or proofread, but if he’s bored he might just go in on one of his days off and get paid a little bit extra for the trouble. Today is one of those days.

After graduating high school, she didn’t really know what to do. Her grades were more than good enough to get into any college, but much to the chagrin of her parents, she decided to study literature at Tokyo University. Grappling with living alone for the first time and newfound academic pressures, her grades quickly declined. She started drinking and smoking. The phone calls from her mother grew increasingly frequent and frantic. At first, she would just sit and listen to the abuse as it came, never offering a word in response - what could she possibly even say? At some point, she simply stopped picking up.

She didn’t really make any friends in her classes, never having anything good to say to them. She would sit in the back row of lectures, only half-listening, and as soon as the professor asked if anyone had any questions she would take her leave. As time went on, she would barely even leave her apartment for class. 

And it was strange, and she knew it was strange, because she had once been a voracious reader. She would spend all her pocket money on books. First Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov; then Proust, Kafka, Camus; now and then she would grow bored of translations and read a Japanese novel or two - Abe, Kawabata, Mishima, Dazai. She would stay inside on sunny days, when everyone else had gone out to play tennis or volleyball, just so she could finish whatever book she was reading.

She had read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina three entire times in high school. Reading it again now, in her introductory Russian literature course, she found she couldn’t get through more than a few pages.

Her professors took notice of her grades and asked her what was wrong. “I don’t know,” she tried to mumble, but the words would not come out no matter how much she moved her lips.

After a year, she couldn’t take it any longer and ended up dropping out. Her parents immediately cut her off. It was all the same for her, flitting around part-time jobs like a moth. 

She was nineteen. It was tough to be a girl in the world for the first time.

Moving along with the deluge of people onto the crowded subway train, Rin grabs a handhold and surveys his surroundings. He has a habit of looking around at the people beside him in a very deliberate manner, fully turning his head towards whoever he’s staring at. In short, a manner that people might consider a little odd. But no one seems to take notice - not the old man sitting beside him, buried in a newspaper, or the woman checking her hair in a pocket mirror, or the clearly hungover salaryman, uncomfortably tugging at his clearly too-tight necktie. On the contrary, it’s Rin who feels like he’s the one being watched. He looks around and around, trying to catch a watcher in the act, but he can’t.

The publishing office is on the fourth floor of a slightly run-down building in Setagaya. The elevator doesn’t ever work, but Rin is probably the least bothered by that out of everyone in the office. He politely sits and listens as his older colleagues complain and his boss tells him he’ll understand when he gets older.

“When I was a kid like you, I did everything. Played baseball, ran track, did swimming. And now look at me. My back killing me every morning.”

Rin clears the final flight of stairs and makes his way into the office. It’s a crowded space, with towering stacks of paper lying atop desks that look far too small in comparison. Even with every window open to catch the breeze, the air is thick with cigarette smoke. An old electric fan lazily pushes the gray haze around the room. “Good morning, sir.”

“Oh, it’s you,” his boss says, looking up from a computer terminal. “Isn’t it your day off?”

Rin nods. “I thought I would see if you needed some extra help around here, sir.”

“That’s awfully polite of you...” Rin’s boss scratches his bald head and thinks for a moment. “We don’t really have much for you to do, though,” he finally says, in a slightly apologetic tone. “Slow day.”

“Actually, since you’re here, why don’t you help me finish proofreading this? We can each take half.”

Rin nods again. He takes his half of the pages and sits down by a window with a set of red ballpoint pens. He’s a methodical worker - totally focused on the page, circling errant punctuation marks and underlining mistyped words as he goes, he barely even notices his boss until he gets a tap on the shoulder.

“Time for lunch, kid. Come on.” He takes a quick glance at Rin’s work. “Almost done already, huh?”

She doesn’t cook for herself often. At the store earlier that day, she had picked up some ingredients - tofu, green onions, miso paste. Nothing to be excited about, she had thought. But it wasn’t like anyone else would be eating it. Having turned on the stove and rummaged around in the cupboards for a knife, she placed the block of tofu on her little plastic cutting board and began mechanically chopping it into centimeter-wide cubes.

Finished, she looked down. Bright crimson blood had splattered all over the board and was slowly running onto the countertop in little rivers. Lifting her hand, she saw that she had totally lopped off the tips of two fingers. 

Horrified, she dropped her hand like she had been caught in the act of taking something that didn’t belong to her. It landed directly on the lit stovetop. Unable to feel the searing heat, she caught on far too late; on the red-hot burner, blood was popping and bubbling like molten magma, and the mangled ends of her fingers had been seared almost black. 

The robotic, methodical way in which she did things didn’t have any protocol for this. Her hand suddenly felt as heavy as stone, and she kept staring at it, as if hoping it would jump up and escape on its own. Or maybe that was the protocol - to wait. To wait until... what, exactly?

Unblinking, she stood rooted to the floor, her vision clouded by the thick black smoke that heralded the stench of death - of gruesome battlefields littered with burning corpses - and her mouth agape but unable to scream for help...

“You work like a robot, you know?”

Rin blushes. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“No, no, I meant that as a compliment! Ahh, forget it...”

His work for the day complete, Rin slouches in his chair and stares out of the window. In the background is the monotonous buzzing of the fan, drowning out his thoughts. Strangely, he finds himself completely unable to remember even a single word he’d read. 

“You work hard for a part-timer. Say, kid, why don’t we go out for drinks?”

The afternoon sun pierces through the window and nearly blinds him. Through its veil, he can faintly see the outlines of green leaves, of pedestrians walking by, of cars stopping at intersections. But they all feel unmistakably foreign to him, these things he’s seen thousands of times. Like he’s watching a scene from a film, curated and filtered through the eyes of a cameraman and not his own.

“What about it, Rin? It’ll just be a chill guys’ night.”

Rin nods like he understands. “Sure.”

Her dad let her have a beer when she was fifteen. She took one sip and immediately spat it out in disgust. He had laughed - a full-throated, deep guffaw - and slapped her heavily on the shoulder. “Man up a little! You won’t get anywhere in life if you don’t like beer.”

She liked it a lot more now, not quite knowing why. Maybe it was because it helped her stop thinking about things. She had a lot more problems now than she did as a kid, that was for sure. So she drank it to be numbed. To be insulated, protected, from whatever the world could throw at her. From whatever she could throw at herself.

And maybe because now she was numbed, she didn’t care so much about the taste. Or the smell, or the sensation, or anything else; the cracking open of the can that had once heralded...

“Looks like you can hold your liquor well, sir.”

“Stop calling me ‘sir’, Rin. We’re at a bar!” Seeing Rin’s puzzled look, he realizes. “Of course! I never properly introduced myself. I’m Kambei.”

“Kambei... like from Seven Samurai?”

“Yeah, exactly! Didn’t expect a youngster like yourself to know that film.” Kambei sips his scotch. “It was my old man’s favourite, and he wanted me to be named after the hero, I guess... I suppose he wanted me to be a hero like that. An honorable man who defends people from bandits. A leader of men.”

He falters. “Or something. I really don’t know what my dad was thinking. Do you like that film, Rin?”

Rin takes a swig of beer and thinks for a second, cocking his head to the side. “Hmm... I think it was pretty good, especially for when it was made. 1954, right?”

“Yeah, that sounds right. Been a long time since then, huh? Jeez, I feel old just saying that...”

“Mm. I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favourites, though.”

“Ahh, well,” says Kambei, finishing his glass and calling the bartender for another. “You probably enjoy it a lot more than me, at least.” His face is more than a little red by now. “When I graduated from high school, my old man had me watch it with him. And sitting there beside him... he was so excited about it, he would grab my arm or point at the screen at certain moments, and in the way that he looked at me I saw more joy than I’d ever seen him express before.”

Kambei pauses. “In that moment, I felt like I had been completely disconnected from him, like I couldn’t relate to him at all. I thought about the statement ‘I am his son’ and I just couldn’t see how that was true.”

“Anyway,” Kambei says, voice trembling, “I just pretended I liked it. I guess you could say I wasn’t really into those ‘boy’ things. At least, that’s what he always said...” 

Rin looks like he wants to say something, but he stays silent. The sprouts of words push through the soil of his brain, but they’re trampled before anything can happen. The right thing to say is born and killed in the same moment. His mouth stays shut.

Kambei slams his glass down and Rin flinches, jolted out of his stupor. For a moment there is silence.

“I’m more of a fan of your name, honestly,” says Kambei eventually. “Short and simple.”

“Ever think about changing yours?” asks Rin. He immediately curses himself. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have...”

Kambei waves it aside. “Nah, it’s fun for me to tell people and have them recognize it. Though, these days, much less people know where it’s from.” He chuckles. “It is kind of a weird name. You never see anyone else with it. Except for the big one, of course.”

Rin thinks and finds that he has to agree.

“What about you, Rin? Ever wanna change your name?” A pause.

“It’s a good name,” Rin says after a while. “I have to give my parents credit for it, I guess. And if I were to change it now, I know I would still turn around if someone called for ‘Rin’.” There’s another pause, as he searches for the right words. “I guess some things you’re just born with.”

Kambei nods slowly, taking a deep sigh. “I understand.”

“It’s one of those things where there’s no use thinking about it,” says Rin, shaking his head. “Like imagining if I’d been born someone else, in a different universe.”

A switch in Kambei’s head suddenly seems to flick on. “That’s no way to think!” he shouts, but after noticing the questioning glances directed his way, he quickly lowers his voice. “Kid, you’re still young. You can do whatever you want, you know? You have to imagine. Dream big. You can live... you can live however you want to.”

“I know, I know,” mumbles Rin, but it’s so quiet that he might as well have not said anything. The question hangs in his head, a noxious gas: what is it, exactly, that I want? How is it that I want to live?

For a few minutes, the two of them just sit there. Kambei looks lost in thought, deaf to the world. The bartender, a heavyset man with a thick mustache, polishes beer glasses with a rag. He glances at them a few times, puzzled.

It’s Kambei who breaks the silence. “I thought of naming my daughter Rin, you know?”

Rin turns to look at him and the two make eye contact. Looking into Kambei’s dark pupils, Rin has no idea what he might be thinking. Yet he feels as though his own are made of glass, that Kambei can see straight through them into his head - that he knows what Rin is thinking, what’s wrong with him, everything about him. That he knows Rin more than Rin knows himself. “What did you go with instead?”

“Yuki.”

“I like that.” Rin visualizes it in his mind. What would Kambei’s daughter look like? “It’s a nice name.”

“Hah. Better than Rin?”

Rin laughs. Hearing it, Kambei breaks into a grin. “So you can laugh too!”

Rin polishes off his glass of beer. “How old is she?”

“Same age as you, actually.”

Try as he might, Rin can’t imagine what someone related to Kambei might look like. Thinking about this girl named Yuki who he’s never met in his life, all he can see is himself.

Kambei raises his hand to call the bartender and Rin notices. “Haven’t you had a bit too much to drink?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” says Kambei. He waves the bartender over for a glass of water and gulps it down greedily, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Looking at him out of the corner of his eye, Rin feels strange. He imagines what Yuki must be like, with a father like this. To him, Kambei feels like the platonic ideal of a father. Is it jealousy? He doesn’t know.

Somehow, though, Rin feels as if Kambei has gone through a life much the same as his own. He knows there’s a question he wants to ask, but he can’t quite put his finger on what it is.

Kambei glances at his watch for probably the first time that night. “Goodness, it’s far too late. The both of us should probably be heading home now, kid.”

Something about what he said seems to ring in Rin’s ears. Maybe I’m just drunk, he thinks.

The two get up from their stools almost at once. “Need me to call you a cab?”

“Nah,” says Rin. “I can just take the train.”

Kambei has a look of concern on his face, his brows knit. “Are you sure you’ll be fine?”

Rin is already out the door, but he takes one last look behind him. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

She had been with a girl once before. If one could call it that. 

A clumsy collision of two bodies. Bodies without pilots, without organs - empty shells drifting across asteroid belts. Gravitational pulls and whims have decided their fate long in advance. Soundlessly, a spectacle of celestial proportions unfolds; plumes of regolith erupt as solid rock shatters like glass...

And yet only a glancing blow. Their paths, fated to diverge. Perhaps in another universe they could have been something - perhaps gravity could have pulled them, their mangled cores, their devastated bodies, into one. Perhaps they could have destroyed one another until they could live apart no more.

But that’s the story of another universe, isn’t it?

She recalled sitting in the half-light that was late afternoon sun filtered through the cracks between window blinds. “Let me try doing your makeup for you,” the other had said, and she had sat there, as still as the painter’s canvas or the sculptor’s block of marble. Their faces inches apart, close enough to smell one another; the intermingling of tangerine peels and cigarette smoke and sweat. The floral print on the bedspread holding firm underneath her trembling legs.

And when they were in the midst of everything she heard nothing, said nothing, felt nothing at all; the other was saying something to her but it was drowned out in the ocean of silence that engulfed them. Words were mouthed and only their shapes were heard through the sight-reading of lips. And so they talked through the flashes of rapidly moving hands, arms; eyes darting side to side as their bodies writhed. She moved, and so did the other. They danced without feeling, without hearing. They waltzed like two paper cranes caught in a gale - that is, just doing what they had been told. How very physical it was, to die together in a trench of nothingness at the bottom of the sea. 

But when they sat like that, in the moments of quiet in between those dances of deafening silence, close enough to touch but with contact modulated through the artist’s pen, she could smell, could feel the fragile brush against her cheeks and now her lips and now her eyelids, could hear their nervous inhales and exhales moving like synchronized swimmers. She could hear the other’s annoyed cluck as she brushed aside a lock of hair that had gotten in the way, and she could feel something in the depths of her heart, emanating from somewhere unknown in this body that she inhabited. Something almost like fire, something she had never before felt in her life...

Rin emerges onto the street from the station entrance and looks around. The sky has turned completely dark. Above him, yellow streetlamps flicker through the gaps in between zelkova leaves, painting him like a sunset.

For whatever reason, he thinks about a girl he knew in high school. They would often walk together, hand in hand until late at night; and he would come home to his mother asking where the hell he had gone, and his father elbowing him in the side and laughing. He couldn’t understand what was so funny.

What had he done today? 

Had it really been him doing those things? It felt more like he was just going through the motions, methodically and mechanically. All he really felt like he’d done was waste away another day.

Of course it was me doing those things, thinks Rin, quickly shaking his head. Who else could it have been? And really did do all of that - all of the boring minutia that makes up life. Yes, he thinks to himself, he lived today. It was tough, but he did it. And he did it yesterday as well. And the day before. And...

And yet as he trudges back home, hands in his pockets clawing and grasping at air, he feels like something is missing. Like he forgot something a long time ago - so long ago that he doesn’t even know what it is anymore.

Well, what could it be? He racks his brain for answers. Nothing at all springs to mind. But there’s something inside there, just under the surface. Rin is sure of that much. Something quiet, almost completely inaudible, yet screaming to be heard.

He kicks a pebble. It clatters down the sidewalk and stops a few meters in front of him. Frustrated, he kicks it again and it goes flying away. “I just don’t know,” he says aloud. The sound echoes down the narrow street.

“I don’t know!” He’s shouting now. At this time of night, he’s sure that someone will tell him to quiet down at any moment. But it’s as if he’s the only one on the street. All of the houses around him have their lights turned out. “Why am I unhappy?” he asks no one in particular. A light breeze makes itself known in the trees, and fallen leaves swirl in the air.

“I have everything I want! I’m free to do anything. I have an apartment. Even if I don’t know what I want to do, I have enough to live, I don’t want for money, I...” Rin’s voice falters. There is no response.

The wind, not listening, continues to blow. Rin is shouting into a void.

It was something about that conversation at the bar, Rin thinks to himself - that’s why I feel like this. He feels like he shouldn’t have taken Kambei up on his offer. But deep down, he knows that isn’t the case. Inside him, something he had gotten close to that night - an unknown part of himself he had been so close to finding - is quickly fading away. 

So he pretends Kambei is there, walking beside him. With the breeze picking up, the two start to walk faster. “I live life feeling like it’s a hopeless baseball game. Like I’m just playing for fun and not to win.”

The wind howls around them. What is Kambei saying? “So why is it so hard? If it’s all just for fun.”

His chest wants to burst. Inside, the piercing shrapnel of words, desires, the explosive force of pure yearning. He thinks about her - where is she right now? Kyoto? Osaka? Nagoya? Kanazawa? It doesn’t matter. He can’t get to her. He wants to die. To die, and be reborn. To scream and be heard. Rin bangs on the inside of the locked cage that is a body, like a chick gasping for air.

And yet he still walks, as if automatically. Rin’s legs move one after the other, unflinching. 

All the way up to his apartment, it’s as if they’re in a gale. All he can hear in his ears is a raging vortex of air - and still he shouts into it, trying to get through. “I live like I’m already dead. Or like my life hasn’t yet started.” 

Head ringing, he fishes his keys out of his pocket. Kambei doesn’t say a word. Or perhaps it’s Rin who’s not talking. Either way, nothing can be heard over the wind’s deafening roar. It’s the sound of silence.

He cracks open the now unlocked door and gingerly tiptoes over the threshold.