A Letter to Ibuki Natsuko (Part 1)

November 5

To: Ibuki Natsuko

Hello,

I hope the bountiful season of autumn finds you well. Already it’s been eight months since that rainy graduation ceremony where Komatsuzaki and I cheered you on with three cries of “Hip hip huzzah!” as you gallantly set sail into the rough seas of society. As you put up an umbrella at the rain-misted Hyakumanben intersection you turned and smiled at us, not deterred one bit by the inclement weather, every inch the worthy captain. That has been you since the Maizuru ocean practicum (where in contrast, both Komatsuzaki and I were seasick to our stomachs).

How fare you in the currents of life?

“Morita, you just worry about your own voyage first,” you may reply. I get that answer a lot, even from my own sister. Perhaps behind their toothy grins the dolphins at the Notojima Aquarium are thinking the same thing.

At your graduation, I promised I would buy you a drink someday, and yet that promise remains unfulfilled. In the first place I have been away from Kyoto, only catching a fleeting glimpse of you in August at the lab…but that matter can wait. Wait! Please, don’t shout, “Die, you disgusting pig!” and rip up this letter just yet! Unworthy as I am, my spirit remains noble, and if I am to die, grant me the opportunity to clear my pervert’s reputation before I lay me down upon the tatami mat.

For the past six months I have been dispatched to the Noto-Kashima Marine Biological Laboratory. It is a tiny facility on the Noto Peninsula, facing out into Nanao Bay. Following my thesis presentation, my advisor summoned me to have the following conversation:

“I’ve been thinking for a long time, Morita. You can be pretty damn spoiled sometimes. I’m not sure you’d get much accomplished sticking around for grad school.”

“I concur.”

“I think we need to toughen you up some, knock some backbone into you while we still can.”

“I concur. Shall I go train with monks in the mountains?”

“We haven’t got time for that, especially since you’re barely graduating as it is. And I’m afraid if you did that you might really become a monk.”

“I concur.”

“I’m sending you to Taniguchi, he’ll set you straight. You know, all the junior lab members call him ‘the Drill Sergeant.’”

Apparently he’d been contemplating sending me to the lab in Noto for a year already. That’s what you call tough love. Imagine how much he must have loved me to kick me into a ravine so deep there was practically zero chance of me ever clawing my way back out. Sometimes love can be heavy. A little too heavy…

Thus I found myself being put on the Thunderbird Express out of town before I’d so much as gotten a glimpse of the new faces in the lab. Looking out the window I saw a rainbow, and a small boy attaching a letter to a red balloon and releasing it into the sky.

From April on I lived alone for the first time in my life, in an apartment by Nanao Station.

Each day I rode a tiny single-car train on the Noto Railway to the Noto-Kashima Marine Biological Laboratory. The director of the lab had apparently been a senior member of the Kyoto lab when my advisor had just joined, so ever since it opened the two labs have been collaborating, and apparently Drill Sergeant Taniguchi, who would be my mentor for the following six months, is an alumnus of the Kyoto lab.

Taniguchi is a strange man. He downs mysterious coelenterate-infused virility enhancement drinks by the liter and enjoys taking moonlit strolls along the beach strumming his mandolin and singing songs of his own invention in a reedy falsetto. However his vocabulary of abusive language is so extensive that I call it the “Kōjien Dictionary of Profanity”; though I admit that this constant torrent of swearing has toughened me up somewhat, I cannot count the number of times I’ve secretly wished for him to drop dead. But underneath it all, he’s a decent guy.

There is very little in the vicinity of the Noto-Kashima Marine Biological Laboratory. There are a few hamlets by the sea to the north and south, but not a convenience store as far as the eye can see. As I wait for the train at the silent, deserted Noto-Kashima Station, I’m often overcome by a profound sense of solitude. In that sense, you might consider it the perfect environment to concentrate on research.

Get chewed out by Taniguchi. Do research. Get chewed out. Study. Get chewed out. That’s my life. It’s such a productive life that it almost doesn’t feel worth living. To people who are used to living unproductively, a productive life is a stressful life.

And that’s why I needed an outlet.

Hence, “epistolary boot camp”.

I would pen letters to my faraway friends in Kyoto, polish my skills in written correspondence, go on to become one of the most storied epistolary writers this world has ever seen, send missives overflowing with warmth throughout the world, help achieve world peace, and by gosh, I’d win the Nobel Peace Prize! At least, that was how I envisioned it.

If I wrote letters to all those people, how come I never wrote to you?

Allow me to explain.

I started off by writing to Komatsuzaki and Ōtsuka. By comparing their accounts I was able to piece together a mental picture of the welcome barbeque for the new lab members that was held on the banks of the Kamo River. I know that you were there, and that Komatsuzaki was blissfully and transparently in love there under the falling cherry blossoms, and I couldn’t help but be a little envious here in exile in this faraway lab by the sea. What fun it must have been, ridiculing that poor sap Komatsuzaki.

Do you remember the welcome banquet they held for us the spring that we joined the lab?

Komatsuzaki and I were in a dead heat in the Kamo River Race, when I fell into Ōtsuka’s carefully laid trap and rolled down the riverbank, and then you kindly offered me that egg-yolk-yellow towel. I still use that towel. It’s hanging out to dry on the veranda right now, fluttering in the gentle autumn wind which whispers throughout Nanao, that happy egg-yolk-yellow towel.

What lovely weather it is today.

Not that that has anything to do with anything.

The problem was Komatsuzaki.

That frontrunner in the field of pioneering idiocy penned lengthy missives to me about his misfortunes in love, a love which he had been spectacularly unsuccessful at concealing from all of our acquaintances. I was once known as both the worst troublemaker and best troubleshooter in all of Sakyo Ward, so I put on my relationship counselor hat and got to work.

The first piece of advice I gave him was: “You need to settle down. Go to Yoshida Shrine and start praying.” While I was working to make his crush a reality, I also started writing to young Mamiya, whom I used to tutor. Furthermore, I began to worry that my baby sister, being a blossoming high school student, was experiencing the first throes of puppy love, and so I assured her that, “Trust in your cosmic big brother, and you’ll never go wrong!” in an attempt to garner some much-deserved respect.

With the practice runs complete, I decided that the time was right to write to you.

But it was precisely then that Taniguchi’s rage boiled over at all of my accumulated experiment failures: the first wrathful coming of Fudō Myōō (six more of which were still to come). I sat there alone late at the lab that night, not a tear left to cry after the sarge had put me through the wringer, and reminisced over my undergrad days in the lab in Kyoto.

Both Komatsuzaki and I used to be terrible at presentations. I remember after the advisor gave me a tongue-lashing I’d be crouched by the rotary evaporator, my face covered in tears, and you’d come by and give me an apple vinegar yogurt. I’d offer you a strawberry daifuku in return, and you’d take the little mochi in your hand and exclaim, “Strawberry daifuku are a fount of knowledge!” And indeed, after this little exchange of sweets I always felt just a little bit more clear-headed.

Do you still eat strawberry daifuku?

Don’t eat too many of them if you do.

The cherry blossoms fell to be replaced by leaves of shimmering green, but at the lab things were as hectic as ever. Komatsuzaki screwed things up so precisely it was almost as if he was trying to fail. “I’m not changing my underpants until I’ve captured her heart!” he declared. What!? Was he serious!? While I was attempting to impress on him how silly it was for a man of his age to be spouting nonsense like this, April drew to a close, and I had yet to write you a letter.

May too passed by in a flurry of confusion. Ōtsuka started spreading an utterly baseless rumour among the junior lab members that I was “getting a little too friendly with a female dolphin at Notojima Aquarium,” sullying my reputation. It’s hard to deal with someone who bases their actions entirely on whether they think something would be amusing or not.

Komatsuzaki remained as unmanageable as ever, and in order to impress the object of his affections he decided to compose a bloodcurdling poem. Taniguchi was in a near-constant state of fury. My little sister was reading Nietzsche and writing all sorts of inscrutable things. I believe you are familiar with her from the All-Japan Maidens’ Association? She is a lovely girl with aspirations to become an astronaut and an unfortunate tendency to point out things that ought to remain unsaid. I had to steer Komatsuzaki back on track, assuage Taniguchi’s anger, and guide my sister to happiness, all at the same time.

Of course, this is a lot for one person to manage, so I’d go relax at the hot springs in Wakura Onsen, chat with the old man at Minowa Books on Ipponsugi Street, and eat Tengu Ham to replenish my vitality. Are you familiar with Tengu Ham?

And so, with all this hullabaloo surrounding me, May whizzed right by.

I attempted several times to write to you. I wanted to encourage you, seeing as you’d just stepped into the working world. But when I stopped and considered, you’d always been the kind of person who would give it there all anyways, whether I said anything or not. In fact during our undergrad days I sometimes wished you would work a little less hard (so I wouldn’t feel so ashamed of myself). On the other hand, I couldn’t just say, “Stop trying,” because trying hard is exactly what we needed to do.

So what could I write to strike a chord and make myself stand out to you? The more I agonized, the harder it was to put anything to paper. And this led to yet another nuisance of a pen pal for me to contend with, someone you are quite familiar with: that amateur of a novelist, Morimi Tomihiko. I was sure that if anyone knew how to pen a superlative letter, it would be someone who made his living from writing.

Have you read his newest book yet? I remember how much you were looking forward to his book signing in our junior year. You used to take out chocolates from your snowman advent calendar and distribute it to us unworthy souls. “Has a kinder soul walked the earth since the Meiji Restoration?” I thought to myself. No, really I did.

Writing to Morimi was a mistake. He bombarded me with letters nearly every day, yet never so much as touched upon how to write letters well, which had been the whole point of me writing to him. Instead all he did was moan on and on about the travails of the creative process. In the end it was I who had to console him. Imagine me, telling someone (much less a professional writer), “Get to work!” It was all rather bemusing.

In June, everyone from the Kyoto lab came to visit Kanazawa, but to my great chagrin not a single person saw fit to let me know. Apparently Ōtsuka had placed a gag order on everyone so that I could “focus on epistolary boot camp.” How wretched that woman can be.

And yet I could not afford to let my pen rest. I pulled Komatsuzaki back from the brink of becoming a stalker; weathered comings 2 to 4 of Taniguchi’s Fudō Myōō; and patiently imparted the importance of being charming on my younger sister. While all this was going on the rainy season began. I’d sit on the train, looking out the window at a rainbow spanning Nanao Bay, and so June came to a close.

July had me running ragged as well.

My old pupil, Mamiya, became smitten with Saegusa, the object of Komatsuzaki’s affections; it’s not easy to give advice to a kid as sharp as him. I received a collection letter from my sister for some ancient debt, and I had to work hard to restore her trust. The stress of the lab caused all the fuzz on my body to fall out, and I was tormented with nightmares of plump marshmallow extraterrestrials landing on the back of my head. In my sleep-fuddled state I took a big bite out of a daruma and hurt a tooth. What a miserable life I led, and yet in his letters Morimi just blithely bragged, “I had sukiyaki at Mishima-tei!” Our very own Komatsuzaki got swept up by Tanabata spirit and fed his crush some “bubble-bobble chimaki”, giving her a magnificent stomachache. Go on, laugh. I don’t mind.

Speaking of Tanabata, that reminds me of the time we all drank sake out of a freshly cut bamboo cup. “Tanabata means bamboo,” Ōtsuka had declared; it was because I was following her orders that I was nearly branded as a criminal. As soon as she saw the manager at the botanical garden approaching in the darkness, she zipped out of there as fast as greased lightning. If she thinks something might be amusing, she eggs us on, but the moment it seems like things might go south she disappears in a flash, leaving us to deal with the consequences. What a genius.

You really bailed me out of a sticky situation back then. So let me say it again: thank you. I don’t make apologies for myself, so if you hadn’t shown up to rescue me, in all likelihood I’d still be back there at the manager’s office, modestly insisting upon my right to remain silent. We attracted no shortage of questioning glances from other students as we carried the rustling bamboo back; what fun it was rushing Ōtsuka and giving her a taste of her own medicine. It couldn’t have been more satisfying. That Tanabata get-together was one to remember.

Komatsuzaki may have upset Saegusa’s stomach with that bubble-bobble chimaki, but he was only getting started. He triggered her allergies with a bouquet of carnations and accosted her while she was with Mamiya during Yoiyama, reading that blood-curdling poem out loud only for her to flee into the night; afterwards he decamped to India, only to be miraculously reunited with her on the banks of the Ganges, when suddenly a fleet of alien ships touched down and a host of chubby marshmallow aliens emerged, performing a celebratory dance in commemoration of the happy couple…okay, that second half might contain some untruths, but it was a blindingly swift series of missteps and turnarounds. Perhaps you already heard of all this from Saegusa at the All-Japan Maidens’ Association.

I wrote a lot of letters to Komatsuzaki out of concern, and as a result I wasn’t able to write any to you. But he ended up capturing Saegusa’s heart without my help anyways. On the other end of it, though, poor Mamiya had his heart broken, and I had to carefully craft my letters to assuage his anguish.

The busier I got, the more brusque my letters became. I have to fault Morimi, too, for never teaching me how to write a good letter. So as you can see, I was not in any shape to be writing you a letter. I seem to recall being a little cantankerous in all of my letters at the time, in spite of the fact that I’d started this whole letter writing business in the first place to take my mind off of things…

The rainy season ended at last, and summer arrived in Noto. Cicadas trilled in the mountains, and thunderheads rose high into the sky beyond Noto Island.

But this year’s summer was shockingly bleak. The only respite I had from it all was taking walks to the shrine near the lab and drinking Calpis. On these walks, I’d think back to the summers I spent in Kyoto. Every time summer break rolled around all those pesky swarms of bicycles would vanish from the suddenly deserted campus. In between experiments we’d spend our downtime gazing outside at the sun-drenched inner courtyard, drinking the Calpis that you used to bring. They say that Calpis tastes like your first love, and while we all shared our own tales of sweet puppy love gone sour, I remember how astonished you were when I steadfastly refused to divulge mine.

So here’s my delayed confession: I never met the first person I fell in love with.

A red balloon rising into the sky. Sheets of paper covered in my writing. The post box that I would pass on my way to school. The whir of the postman’s bicycle. The feeling of the envelopes containing her replies in my hands. Her neat handwriting. The odd illustrations she’d sometimes include. Those are the memories that Calpis brings back for me.

It was a correspondence, one that ended in heartbreak. In other words, I fell in love with a pen pal.

In hindsight, I kind of overdid the epistolary boot camp thing.

All through August, whenever I came back to my apartment there’d be a letter waiting for me in the mailbox. I’d read a letter and write back, read a letter and write back.I didn’t have time to think. I just wrote. Komatsuzaki confided all sorts of idiotic worries to me, things like “I can’t stop myself from thinking about b--bs. I just love -oo-- so much” (in order to protect the author’s privacy and the reader’s sensibilities, certain words have been censored). Back home, my folks were having family councils in my absence to fret about my future. My little sister complained about the time I pushed her into a pool when we were kids. Morimi kept up a steady stream of moaning, so I sent him some story ideas. Mamiya sent me a letter from his relatives’ house in Wakayama, so I wrote back. And while all this was going on, I was also having heated discussions with Taniguchi and trying to keep up with my studies and research…

Morita, you done good.

Whenever I was sulkily setting up an experiment again after bungling it the first time, I would reminisce on all those all-nighters you and I pulled together. While Komatsuzaki and I snivelled, “What did we do to deserve this?” you’d calmly pull up a row of chairs and lie down for some shuteye, not the slightest perturbation in your breathing. When you discovered that some cock---ches (for purposes of hygiene, certain words have been censored) had crawled into our empty shoes by the door, you let out a shriek and jumped up onto those chairs like an elephant that had seen a mouse. And of course there were all those visits to Neko Ramen. And that time that you blew up the professor’s profile picture and wore it as a mask to a practice thesis presentation; I was shocked at how spot-on your imitation of him was. Komatsuzaki was so convinced that you were the professor that he actually grovelled at your feet.

Those were some good times.