Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto Page A

to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying. True, I didn’t know all that much about her life. But I couldn’t understand why it would be so painful for her to watch someone pack up and leave her apartment. Maybe we just didn’t understand each other, I don’t know. It’s true that I’d had nowhere to live, that I used her. And the fact is, I never planned to stay with her, a woman like myself, for the long haul. We were living together, and she liked me. So when she got physical, I responded. That’s all there was to it. But before long, I realized that she saw things differently. Or rather, some part of me realized it, and I kept pretending I hadn’t noticed. I felt horrible about what I had done. She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn’t know how to handle.
    My memories solidified into a mass of any number of different images and cast a relentless shadow on my heart.
    I glanced up at the road ahead, trying hard to pull myself together, to focus on the rigors of the hike. And there it was, right there in front of me: that mysterious shrine. There was no statue of Jizō, the guardian of children, nor of any one of the other figures one might expect to find in his place; there was nothing but the shrine itself and offerings of flowers, long chains of origami cranes, and sake—none of which had been set out recently. A thought rose in my mind before I could stop it.
    Something incredibly evil is resting here—something that used to live in the vicinity. I’m sure of it.
    I can’t explain why I felt this way. Maybe there used to be a statue of Jizō or something here, but it broke—maybe that’s all it was? Or maybe someone carried it off? I tried to believe this. But it wasn’t true. Something hung in the air there, without a doubt—a passion of terrible intensity that had kept accumulating new layers over the years until it became one dense mass. The feeling that came over me then was so creepy that I just stood and stared.
    As I looked more closely, I noticed ten or so pitch-black stones, each shaped like a small egg, that had been arranged in a circle right in the middle of the shrine. There was something very eerie about them too.
    I got out of there quick, trying as much as possible to keep the ring of stones out of my view. During my travels, I had sometimes come across such things. There are, without a doubt, places in this world where something has settled, and it’s best for us little humans not to get involved.
    I thought of various places I had visited in the past: caves I had seen in Bali and Malaysia that were so deep they made me shudder; sites in Cambodia and Saipan that brimmed with achingly dark passions left over from the war. I had visited many such places when I was young, accompanying my father on business trips—maybe that was another reason I became as sensitive to these things as I did. And it’s true, when I ask about places where I’ve felt that something is wrong, they usually turn out to have borne witness to something terrible.
    Ultimately, though, it’s living people that frighten me the most. It’s always seemed to me that nothing could be scarier than a person, because as dreadful as places can be, they’re still just places; and no matter how awful ghosts might seem, they’re just dead people. I always thought that the most terrifying things anyone could ever think up were the things living people came up with.
    As I rounded the bend, the eerie feeling I’d had suddenly slipped away, drawing back from the area around my shoulders, and I found myself surrounded once more by the sounds and sensations of a quiet evening.
    Night lowered its heavy curtain. The entire area was flooded with air so clear it made me feel wonderful. When a breeze blew up, fallen autumn leaves of all different colors danced up through the dusk, fluttering toward me. I felt as if I were wrapped in a piece of cloth woven