Excerpt from Najimi 2
As soon as I sat down I took off my shoes. Stretching out my feet, I felt something under the seat in front of me—a copy of Tanizaki's novel The Key. I opened the book at random, and there, highlighted in yellow marker, were the words a pale,secret flame.
I was headed for Shimabara, in Kyushu, longitude 130.22 N, latitude 32.46 E. Go any further south and you drop off the edge of the earth. My cousin Miho was getting married to a thin asthmatic chemical engineer. A dozen stickers of the happy couple adorned the wedding invitation. In her letter she confessed that he had talked her into taking fruit to bed with them. By the glint in his eyes I could tell that he had an imagination. Miho, poor thing, probably couldn't even spell the word. A pale, secret flame, that was her in a nutshell. As a teenager I despised her slow, awkward gestures, and did my best to force her into situations demanding that she speak in the company of highly cultivated people, so as to make her accent sound all the more uncivilized. But I often failed to undermine her because her manner was so disarming that everyone liked her—poets, babies, policemen, beggars.
Funny thing was, none of my other cousins amused me, not like her. I watched this plain, relatively ignorant girl pick up an eraser I had dropped and set it back on my desk. She wasn't helping me, the eraser belonged there, that was all. One day she broke through a crowd of people surrounding two boys fighting at the playground near my house. She walked over to the boys and just said, 'That must hurt.' They got to their feet, tucked their shirts in, and the crowd dispersed. Friends again, the handsome but acne-faced boys followed us as far as my front gate, when they passed, winking at her, not me.
As the years went by her visits to me grew less frequent. I'd hear from her at Christmas-time, or when a family member died. Reading her letter that came with the invitation it occurred to me that while I did outshine her in many ways, I was never better than Miho at catching grapes in my mouth.