Free Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto Page B

imperceptible periods of relief. The instant the unbearable pain and the tears faded away, and I saw with my own eyes how vast the workings of the universe were, I would feel my sister’s soul.
    Sakai understands all that, I thought, and the fondness I felt for him deepened a little more. For me, love is always accompanied by a feeling of surprise. I like people who are always doing things that would never have occured to me at that moment. As crushed and dispirited as I was, that part of me didn’t change.
    “It’s a perfect November evening—you can smell the end of autumn in the air,” said Sakai, looking out the window. “I guess we just have to try and keep our spirits up.”
    “Keep our spirits up, yes, but not by forcing ourselves to be cheerful.”
    “Your mom said this morning that if we give ourselves over completely to our grief, Kuni will only move farther away.”
    “I’m impressed that she can say something like that so soon.”
    I had a good view of the branches of the trees that lined the street. Young men and women were looking through the clothes at a used-clothing shop; they were having fun, making lots of noise. There was a greengrocer next door with a whole array of different colored vegetables set out under the lights, all of them looking really lovely. Orange persimmon. The brown of burdock root, the orange of carrots. Colors the gods made, so gorgeous one never tires of looking at them.
    A month earlier, I never would have believed that I would be feeling so calm again so soon, admiring vegetables while I sat drinking a cup of coffee. One never knows what the future may hold. In our hearts, we were all peacefully saying goodbye, to my sister’s life. Or rather, we were moving in that direction, because we had no choice. That was the unbending path down which we were headed, as quietly as the deepening of autumn and the onset of winter.

2
    Stars
    Late one afternoon, I went to the office where Kuni used to work. Total strangers kept coming up to me with tears streaming from their eyes to say one thing or another. After a while it started getting on my nerves, though I felt their pain.
    The woman at the next desk began crying when I went through the things in Kuni’s desk; she said she couldn’t believe how much my hands looked like my sister’s. I told her we looked the same naked, too, but she was in no condition to laugh at my joke; she left the office early, still crying.
    Everyone wanted to touch me, the way people do at funerals, which made me feel very ill at ease. But I could sympathize with that, too. I learned that Kuni had been a cheerful and dedicated worker, and that she was great with computers. She had been so neat that there was hardly anything for me to get rid of.
    I found lots of things in her locker that seemed out of place at the office: a pair of outlandish ski boots, for instance, and all sorts of snowboarding equipment, which she had just gotten into recently.
    When the time came to save Kuni’s e-mail on a disk and erase all the personal information from her computer’s hard drive, even I started to cry. The man who was helping out, one of her coworkers, cried with me. This stranger and I sat in the secretary’s office where Kuni had worked, passing tissues back and forth. All these chores made me even sadder than the sight of Kuni hooked up to the respirator, eyes staring into space. I mentioned that to Kuni’s coworker, and he said through his tears that he understood. Being with you is agonizing, he said, because it feels like I’m with Kuni. The way you talk, your gestures—it forces me to admit that she’s gone, he said. You make me remember her.
    I didn’t really know much about Kuni’s day-to-day life. Just that she worked as a secretary for one of the company’s directors.
    But there at the office, I realized that the loss of one ordinary worker is enough to send emotions rippling through the entire staff of a company. And the traces of that