I don’t think I have much time left, so I’m going to say what I want to say. Even if nobody’s listening, it won’t bother me any. I just want to say what comes to me, the way I want to say it. Because I really don’t think I’m going to be thinking or saying anything for much longer.
I know I’m an old woman who can’t move her body the way she used to, and I know it’s spring. I heard somebody say so, close enough to my bed for me to hear. And she sounded upset. Because something terrible is happening out in the world. Lots of people are dead, or dying, and nobody knows what to do. She was upset about it, but I could hear a tinge of glee in her voice, and that reminds me who was talking. It was the woman who’s been taking care of me for years as a live-out housekeeper, whose name I remember sometimes, but not always, and at the moment I’m drawing a blank. Not today, and not for a while now, but back when I felt a little more like myself, when I would watch her on her knees, wiping the floor, or folding the bedsheets, especially when I was watching her large figure from behind, it always made me think of my own body when I was younger. I’d watch her flesh-padded body as she sweat, her thick dark hair falling over her shoulders, her cheeks always rosy.
Sometimes I’d fantasize about her having sex. No, not sometimes. I would fantasize constantly about the sex she’d had, all the sex she could have. Once I stopped being able to sit up, and the people I’d been close to stopped coming to see me, I lost myself in those fantasies day after day. I wondered what kind of man had last enjoyed that large body of hers, and I wondered about all the ways she’d enjoyed his body, too. I would do all I could to use the power from the sweetest parts of those fantasies to bring back the half-forgotten feelings of the sex I’d had in the distant past, to experience it once again. When it worked, I’d slip gently into sleep, comforted by the lingering sensations of patched-together memories. But then I’d always wake up, alone, inside this aged body.
Unless that’s changed, too, a day is still only twenty-four hours, and it won’t be many days now before I die. That’s why I’m going to say what I want to say. I want to talk about my own time, the time when I felt most like myself, the age I loved, the age I most enjoyed being at the time. It doesn’t bother me if nobody listens. Tell me—what do I look like from where you are? An old woman with a chest like a plank of wood, raised veins showing through her brown arms? A woman whose eyes are so sunken you can’t even tell if she’s asleep or awake? Well, you’re wrong. You can’t see it, but in my body, I’m moving, remembering, feeling, and living. And I’m not scared of death. It’s been years since I’ve felt any real pain. There’s no longer any need to divide one day and the next, no line between them, and even though I’m old and feeble, there’s something inside me, expanding and pouring out, and that’s the real me. The housekeeper says terrible things are happening in the world, but that’s the world she’s talking about and not me. I’m going to die, and it won’t have anything to do with the world, and the world could die, too—and that wouldn’t have anything to do with me, either. People talk about the world ending, but do they ever talk about the world getting older? I tell myself I’ll ask her the next time she comes close, but my voice is so weak that I can’t get a word out. I’m tired of drifting in and out, so I sleep a little. I forget what I was going to ask. Then I remember a little, then I sleep, and then I find myself here again. If she comes close again, I might want to ask her why it is that when she’s worked up about what’s going on in the world, she always sounds kind of gleeful. Death isn’t the sort of place you can just visit. Death means not being able to come back to this place, to this body. It’s the inability to ever come back, the goneness, that makes death death. But I’m not afraid of being gone, and I’m not afraid of death.
I haven’t been with that many men—I can remember them all. I was young when I got married and had a daughter, and once she got to be a little bigger, nobody ever touched me anymore. I was alone in my body. I used to fill empty afternoons remembering the first time I had sex, drinking tea, gossiping with my girlfriends, and wiping down the windows; then, at night, I’d crawl into bed and return to my fantasies. But that never took me anywhere, doesn’t take me anywhere now. What I want to remember isn’t the right, good kind of sex; it’s the kind I couldn’t ever tell anybody about—and this is where I go back to that time, the time when I was most myself. There was a time in my life when I had sex with a man who wasn’t my husband, and in those short-lived days I was reckless and I lied, said things I didn’t mean to, and thought all kinds of things without thinking anything at all.
There was a night when my lips couldn’t have been any redder. I was thirty-nine, and it was late February. I was thirty-nine, and we were in a place unreachable by anyone but us. Where did I meet him, and how did we come to spend those dark hours together? I can’t remember any details. But I know we met and spent long hours in each other’s arms, in a time and place nobody could ever know, and it was real—it really happened.
I remember that warm night when I came home and my family was already in bed, and even though I hadn’t touched my lipstick, I was surprised to find my lips bright red, full of blood. My mascara was all over the place and my face was a mess, yet in the mirror I looked so fulfilled, brimming with life. My lips were as red as flames, and that alone made me look exceptional, desirable. Seeing that coming from me—that redness, that heat—was so powerful that it was hard to tear myself away from the mirror. And he had this force, and when I say “force,” I mean the way he first pulled me close, not like he was trying to break down the boundary between us, but like he was relying on some other power to bring himself toward me. Like he was coming right for me. Sometimes we’d hold each other until we couldn’t tell ourselves apart, but there were other times when it just didn’t work. Either way, when I went home, I always wanted to die, like there was nothing else I wanted, nothing I wanted more. Maybe that’s why I kept meeting him, to try to see which one of us was actually stronger—me or my desire to die.
There were times when being with him was all I could think about, and I’m pretty sure there were times when he felt the same way. And when we were together, in each other’s arms, I often wondered if a time would come when each of us would fondly recall what we were feeling in our own bodies at that moment. I wonder if he—if his body—is still out there somewhere. Is anything of those days, of my time, still out there? Why do I keep thinking about it, even now? Could that be proof that there was something more to those days? Something that outlasted the overwhelming desire to die that used to fill me when I was with him?
The housekeeper comes.
I turn toward her, and we say a couple of things to each other. She sits in the chair, opens the newspaper, and reads a few lines out loud for me. Calmly, she states the date, the month, the year, then recites a few numbers—people dead, people dying—and tells me about the weather and what the clouds are doing. Nobody talks about sex. Nobody talks about the way things used to be. But I want to talk about the sex I had, when I was in my time. I want to talk about memories that exist only when I speak them into being, to go into memories that will soon vanish forever.
Behind her large body, I see a vase with no flowers in it. Her massive, bulging bosom is covered in sweat. Her skin is pink and tender, like freshly steamed meat, and I can almost see the droplets forming on the tip of her nose and on her chin. Back when I was in my prime, when I was pink, when it was my time.
Hey, I say in a small voice. Why are there no flowers in the vase?
She looks up from the newspaper, shrugs, and says, Because I couldn’t find any nice ones. Nobody has the kind of flowers that you put in a vase anymore.
I try imagining flowers—nice ones and not nice ones—but it doesn’t work. So, um, she says. I won’t be able to keep coming here much longer. Somebody else is going to be with you starting next month.
You know, I say, working up my courage. When I look at you, memories come back to me… Then my throat goes dry, and she hands me a glass of lukewarm water. My fingers look distorted through the glass. She watches me as I get the water down. That’s nice, she says and then nods a few times. You mean you remember the old days? When you were younger?
Yes, when I was thirty-nine, I say. When I was seeing a man—a man who wasn’t my husband.
Wow, she says with a smile. That’s great. I always thought people spent these moments thinking about their kids, things like that. I guess you never stop being a woman.
I can’t always remember, I say. But I do on the days you’re here. There was this one night when my lips were so red, and when I see you, I tell her, that’s what comes back to me.
Wow, red lips? So you were wearing lipstick? Hey, I’ve never heard you talk this much before, she said, showing me her gap-toothed smile. But know what? Staying at home isn’t all bad. I’m telling you, it’s crazy out there. I mean, I wish I could spend all day in bed. Not like I have a choice, though. My new job’s at a warehouse. I think it’s going to be hard work, but they’re giving me a place to live, so I can’t complain, I guess.
I nod a few times, then say, Oh, on your last day here, could you make your lips red for me? What’s that, she asks, looking at me curiously. Your lips, I repeat. Sorry, I don’t know what you’re trying to say. Are you feeling tired? She asks, her voice a little higher now. You know, in my time, when I was my own, I say. But my voice doesn’t make a sound, and she leaves the room with the vase held against her chest.
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Copyright Mieko Kawakami 2025, originally published in the audio original Ashes of Spring, used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
