Sumire was so taken aback she was speechless. And missed the chance to ask the obvious questions. What had happened to Miu 14 years ago? Why had she become half her real self? And what did she mean by half, anyway? This enigmatic announcement, in the end, only made Sumire more and more smitten with Miu. What an awesome person, she thought.
*
Through fragments of conversation Sumire was able to piece together a few facts about Miu. Her husband was Japanese, five
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years older and fluent in Korean, the result of two years as an exchange student in the economics department of Seoul University. He was a warm person, good at what he did, in point of fact the guiding force behind Miu’s company. Even though it was originally a family-run business, no one ever said a bad word about him.
Ever since she was a little girl, Miu had had a talent for playing the piano. Still in her teens she had won the top prize at several competitions for young people. She went on to a conservatoire, studied under a famous pianist and, through her teacher’s recommendation, was able to study at a music academy in France. Her repertoire ran mainly from the late Romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn, to Poulenc, Ravel, Bartók, and Prokofiev. Her playing combined a keen, sensuous tone with a vibrant, impeccable technique. In her student days she held a number of concerts, all well received. A bright future as a concert pianist looked assured. During her time abroad, though, her father fell ill, and Miu shut the lid of her piano and returned to Japan. Never to touch a keyboard again.
“How could you give up the piano so easily?” Sumire asked hesitantly. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. I just find it—I don’t know—a little unusual. I mean, you had to sacrifice a lot of things to become a pianist, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t sacrifice
“I sacrificed
“Weren’t you sorry to give up? You’d almost made it.”
Miu gazed into Sumire’s eyes searchingly. A deep, steady gaze. Deep within Miu’s eyes, as if in a quiet pool in a swift stream, wordless currents vied with one another. Only
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gradually did these clashing currents settle.
“I’m sorry,” Sumire apologized. “I’ll mind my own business.”
“It’s all right. I just can’t explain it well.”
They didn’t talk about it again.
*
Miu didn’t allow smoking in her office and hated people to smoke in front of her, so after she began the job Sumire decided it was a good chance to quit. Being a two-packs-of-Marlboro-aday smoker, though, things didn’t go so smoothly. After a month, like some animal that’s had its furry tail sliced off, she lost her emotional grip on things—not that this was so firm to begin with. And as you might guess, she started calling me all the time in the middle of the night.
*
“All I can think about is having a smoke. I can barely sleep, and when I do sleep I have nightmares. I’m constipated. I can’t read, can’t write a line.”
“Everybody goes through that when they try to stop. In the beginning at least,” I said.
“You find it easy to give opinions as long as it’s about other people, don’t you?” she snapped. “You’ve never had a cigarette in your life.”
“Hey, if you can’t give your opinion about other people, the world would turn into a pretty scary place, wouldn’t it? If you don’t think so, just look up what Joseph Stalin did.”
On the other end of the line Sumire was silent for a long time. A heavy silence like dead souls on the Eastern Front.
“Hello?” I asked.
She finally spoke up. “Truthfully, though, I don’t think it’s because I stopped smoking that I can’t write. It might be one
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reason, but that’s not all. What I mean is stopping smoking is just an excuse. You know: ‘I’m stopping smoking; that’s why I can’t write. Nothing I can do about it.’”
“Which explains why you’re so upset?”
“I guess,” she said, suddenly meek. “It’s not just that I can’t write. What really upsets me is I don’t have confidence any more in the act of writing itself. I read the stuff I wrote not long ago, and it’s boring. What could I have been thinking? It’s like looking across the room at some filthy socks tossed on the floor. I feel awful, realizing all the time and energy I wasted.”
“When that happens you should call somebody up at three in the morning and wake him up—
“Tell me,” said Sumire, “have you ever felt confused about what you’re doing, like it’s not right?”
“I spend more time being confused than not,” I answered.
“Are you serious?”
“Yep.”
