Akiko's Quiet Happiness

1

I recognized the composition by its first notes: Chopin, a nocturne, the eighth. At the piano: an unassuming woman the age of my mother, to her left and right two shopping bags bulging at their seams. With her eyes closed, she played so well that passersby began stopping in their tracks. Although the piece was much too subdued for a public piano in a noisy shopping arcade, more and more listeners came under her spell all the same. Soon, not a footstep could be heard, not a cough, not a whisper.
The woman took her time.
Her upper body swayed slowly to the rhythm of the music. I couldn’t believe how much this stranger was revealing of herself in public, couldn’t believe the tones she elicited from the instrument.
Each one of them pierced my heart.
Right where it hurts the most, where no one else could reach.
Of all compositions, it had to be my mother’s favorite. I hadn’t listened to it since the day she was cremated. I swallowed the lump in my throat and bit my lip.
After the final note, the woman let her arms fall to her side and remained motionless for a moment. Silence hung in the air. No one moved.
She opened her eyes, taking note of her audience. A wisp of a smile flickered across her face, uncertain and embarrassed. Hesitant, she rose, grabbed her shopping bags, and vanished into the crowd as if nothing had happened.
It took a while for people to continue on their way. I remained behind, alone.
My heart was pounding as though I’d been sprinting.

“So sorry I’m late.” Naoko stood before me. She was out of breath. “What’s wrong? Are you unwell?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“You’re trembling!”
“Everything’s fine. I’m probably just hungry.” What was I supposed to say? Naoko had no interest in music.
She took my arm, and we entered an izakaya where we had eaten many times before. The food was good and cheap, as was the sake. We ordered edamame, sashimi, grilled fish marinated in miso, tamagoyaki, a few yakitori skewers, and two large glasses of beer.
I still could not get Chopin’s melody out of my head.
“Is everything okay?” Naoko asked again.
I nodded.
After the waiter had left, she pulled a pink photo album out of her bag and laid it on the table before me. Glued to the cover was the photo of a radiantly beautiful woman in a white wedding dress, holding a bouquet. The picture was taken from the side, with the woman turning her head slightly and beaming at the camera. She glowed in a warm, soft light from the setting sun or from a spotlight. My eyes shuttled back and forth between the album and Naoko.
“Is that you?” I blurted out.
“Who else?”
Too astonished to reply, I stared at the picture. I had never seen Naoko look that beautiful. If I were being honest, it surprised me that she was even able to look that beautiful. Not that she was an ugly, plain woman—not at all. Naoko was half a head shorter than me, slightly stout, and had large breasts and robust upper arms and legs without seeming plump or fat. She had a round, somewhat flat face, full lips, and narrow eyes, and for as long as I had known her wore a pageboy hairstyle that looked fantastic on her. She had grown up in Osaka and was the only woman at the company who dared to wear bright colors: canary cardigans, floral blouses, scarves in rose, green, or pink. Whether on the street or at the train station, she was always recognizable from a distance in her red coat amid the sea of pedestrians wearing black, gray, and navy blue.
She had a certain effect on men. There was hardly a man among us in the department, I suspect, who wouldn’t have wanted to visit a love hotel with her.
Impressed, I opened the album to its first page. She looked even more beautiful in the next picture. It was taken head-on, with the contours of her décolleté delineated at the neckline of her tight-fitting gown, the silhouette of a temple vaguely visible in the background. She was beaming, which was not a smile of hers I was familiar with.
I leafed carefully from one page to the next. The photos showed a happy Naoko trying on different wedding dresses, Naoko at the hairdresser, Naoko having her makeup done, Naoko at the florist—always at the center of a circle of laughing women who were doing her hair, tracing her eyebrows, holding a veil, or opening a car door. Naoko in a limousine, cheerfully waving from the open window. Naoko in a garden on a red bridge, a swan in the foreground.

What was missing was a picture of her with the groom, which came as no surprise. Naoko had married herself.

When she’d told me about her idea a year earlier, I’d thought she was joking. She said she was going to turn thirty soon and wanted to be married before then. Even as a little girl, she had dreamed about a wedding in white, about herself as a bride with a veil, wearing a crown in her hair and a dress that women only wear once in their lives.
But she’d never dreamed about a bridegroom. Nothing about that had changed, she explained.
She didn’t want to spend her life with a man, or with a woman. She didn’t want to fall asleep every night next to the same person and wake up next to them the following morning. She didn’t want to share her breakfast with anyone. She wanted to go to bed when she felt like it, not when it was expected of her. She didn’t want to have to wait for anyone, and, even more importantly, she didn’t want to feel bad for keeping someone else waiting. She hated the smell of another person in her bed or in her bathroom, which was one reason why she frequented love hotels.
But because she didn’t want to forgo a wedding, she had decided to marry herself.
Throughout the months that followed, Naoko would tell me about her wedding preparations every time we met up. She would describe in detail the kind of dress she was considering and how much fun she had at the fittings. She wanted me to tell her if she should wear a veil and where I would spend my wedding night if I were her.
I’d listened to it all and still hadn’t believed she would really go through with it. Now I was clapping the album shut, speechless. “Wow” was all I could muster.
The waiter set our beers on the table. We raised a toast to the newlyweds.
“Did you ever think I could look so pretty?”
“No . . . I mean, yes,” I stammered, slightly embarrassed.
“I didn’t. I really didn’t. At first, I thought it was just going to be a few framed photos and an album as a memento, but I was wrong. I look at the pictures and see how pretty I can be. Me, all by myself, without a man.”
She raised her glass. “Kampai.”
“Kampai,” I replied.
A server brought us a plate of raw tuna. We ordered two glasses of sake.
“Even my mother liked the album.”
“You showed it to your mother?”
“And to my mother-in-law . . .”
“What did she say?”
“That I found a good match.”
We giggled and laughed until the chef behind the counter shot us an inquisitive look. Naoko apologized, which we did several times more over the course of the evening, so loud were we. We pondered where the honeymoon might be, what a blessing it was that Naoko already knew her mother-in-law so well and liked her, and that presumably there wouldn’t be any strife between parents and in-laws in this marriage, to which Naoko demurred that, with her parents, you could never be sure. I judged it to be quite an advantage that neither partner in Naoko’s marriage could cheat on or lie to the other, but she took exception to this; there were plenty of people who cheated on and lied to themselves. After pondering for a moment, I agreed with her. What bothered us was a potential divorce: how does one go about divorcing oneself?

It had gotten late. We parted ways at Shinjuku Station; she was headed to Shibuya, and I continued on foot to the Odakyu Line.
While I was walking through the long corridors to the platforms, the pianist popped into my head again. In hindsight, I regretted not having followed her to offer my thanks. It had been a long time since anyone had given so much of themselves to me. I saw her before my mind’s eye, with her stringy hair, that somewhat old-fashioned jacket, and her full shopping bags. She had looked like an ordinary housewife.
I thought of my mother. Tomorrow was the second anniversary of her death.
I don’t believe in coincidences, she had always said.
Everything happens for a reason.

At home, I cracked open another can of beer. Fish will swim had been one of my mother’s sayings whenever she’d retrieve another beer or the bottle of white wine from the fridge during a meal.
My cellphone buzzed. Naoko sent me her wedding photo with a big fat heart and the words “say ‘I do’ to you” underneath. She’d noticed how much of an impression the pictures and their story had made on me. I surprised myself. Until this evening, a wedding had never played any part in my thoughts. Certainly not in my dreams. I didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t want one. I’d never used a dating app. I took care to be as amiable as possible when I turned down the occasional invitation from a colleague to a meal, to coffee, or to the movies. Being with another person made me feel awkward unless I was meeting up with Naoko or Tomomi, and even their company was too much for me on some evenings. I didn’t like answering questions from strangers about myself. I found it taxing to discuss what I thought about a film, a book, or a new manga series; who my favorite actors were; whether I preferred to eat fish raw, grilled, or fried; whether I’d ever been to Okinawa or Hawaii, or whether I dreamed of traveling there.
I felt more comfortable in groups than tête-à-tête. I didn’t find it difficult to join in the laughter, to praise the food, to refill sake cups, and from time to time to nod approvingly at the right moments. That was enough not to attract notice among my colleagues and to give me the feeling, once again, of not being an outsider whom no one wants anything to do with.

When I looked at Naoko’s wedding photo, something transpired within me. All of a sudden, I was imagining how I’d look in a white wedding gown with a veil and flowers. I envisioned myself posing in a park and holding a sprig of a blossoming cherry tree. What Akiko would I discover in photos of a wedding to myself?
Did I want to know?
Why didn’t I?

• • •

I awoke with a headache. It was Saturday, the day I did little else but recover from the week. My office job wasn’t especially interesting, but it was stressful, and the days were long.
Often I’d lie in bed on Saturdays until noon, run a few errands in the afternoon, do the laundry, watch a movie, read manga or a book, practice French vocabulary, and go to bed early. Every other weekend, I had an hour of French tutoring with Madame Montaigne.
I made myself coffee and heated up a croissant.
The longer I thought about Naoko’s wedding, the more I liked the idea.
I found several million hits on Google for “solo wedding.” There were agencies in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto offering all sorts of variations of such weddings. Some arranged two-to three-hour or half-day photo-shoots in a studio, which included the wedding dress, makeup, and a hair stylist. Their websites featured photos of young women in bridal gowns with veils or a small tiara on their heads. Quite a few of them were younger than me, some of them grinning at the camera like schoolgirls. They looked like they were playing dress-up at a cosplay event. On other faces, though, I saw the same happiness, the same joy, the same pride, the same amazement I had seen in Naoko’s pictures.
Other companies organized elaborate all-day events at hotels to which you could bring friends and witnesses, or even book a groom and guests in addition. There were all-inclusive packages or long price lists with extras like limousine service and hotel suites for the wedding night. That wasn’t what I was looking for. I was fascinated by Naoko’s pictures. I was fascinated by the fact that she was able to transform herself like that—from a friend and colleague into a beaming bride—and that she didn’t need anyone else to look so beautiful.

I showered, got dressed, and cleaned the apartment. With its two rooms and kitchen, it was really too large and too expensive for just me, but I was attached to it, and my mother had left me what, for our standards, was a shockingly large life insurance policy. As a single mother, she’d presumably been afraid of what might happen to me if she were to die suddenly and, with that money, had wanted to make sure I could at least go to university and be taken care of for a while.
For the next few years, I wouldn’t have to worry financially.
I swept the tatami mats and the kitchen, vacuumed the hallway, loaded the washing machine, and soon after hung up the laundry to dry.
While cleaning the bathroom, I caught sight of myself in the mirror, straightened up, stood still, and regarded myself. With no makeup, my skin was pale, almost white, and still wrinkle-free. My face was narrower than that of most women I knew, my nose longer and pointier, my eyes rounder and larger. I’d used to hate the small black birthmark on my right cheek, but now it didn’t bother me. My lips were full and naturally red, so I only ever wore an understated lipstick. I brushed the hair out of my face and held it back in a ponytail, turning my head from one side to the other. My ears were too big, I thought, and stuck out slightly. That’s why I rarely wore my hair in a ponytail. I used to be miserable about my looks, but now found myself neither particularly pretty nor particularly ugly. I was not a woman who attracted the gazes of men, and that was fine by me. Would I still transform in my wedding photos like Naoko had?

That evening, I went on a walk through Shimokita. It was a warm, early summer’s day, the streets full of people. Ever since the train tracks had been routed underground, the neighborhood had changed. The large, somewhat chaotic market around Shimokitazawa Station, where my mother and I had often gone to eat and drink on weekends in those early years, was long gone. In the secondhand stores, next to the hand-me-down dress shirts, T-shirts, and jeans, there were now used clothes and shoes from Prada or Louis Vuitton bags. A big outpost of Muji had opened, a new hotel, an organic supermarket; thrift shops and smaller restaurants and bars like my mother’s were rapidly disappearing.
Later, I bought another cold tea and a slice of baumkuchen at the Lawson at Higashi-Kitazawa Station. After exiting the store, I noticed a man on the opposite corner. He was conspicuously tall, had long, curly hair, and wore a dark-green hooded jacket. With his slightly slouching posture and his head somewhat drawn in, he looked like he wanted to make himself smaller than he was.
He looked toward me, and our eyes met. Immediately, he turned away again.
Without expecting to, I’d seen Kento-kun again. Kobayashi Kento-kun—for the first time in thirteen years.