up. “But why don’t you ask him yourself. I’ll get things ready for our
dinner and then I’ll be back.”
“Please, don’t worry about me.”
I went along with Tomiko and borrowed a cup. It’s best to get the sake in
quickly when you’re talking to a mute.
“It seems as though your love affairs have become Tomiko’s property
now. I guess that’s the way the past works.”
I may have hesitated to use the word “death”— perhaps that was why I
had said “the past.”
But surely as long as he was alive the past was old Akifusa’s property?
Or should one think of it as a sort of joint ownership?
“Maybe if it were possible for us to give our past to someone, we’d just
want to go ahead and give it.”
“A past really isn’t the sort of thing that belongs to anyone—maybe I’d
say that one only owns the words that are used in the present to speak about
the past. Not just one’s own words—it doesn’t matter whose words they
are. No, hold on—except that the present instant is usually silent, isn’t it?
Even when people are talking like I am now, the present instant is just a
sound—‘I’ or ‘a’ or ‘m’—it’s still just meaningless silence, isn’t it?”
“No. Silence is certainly not meaningless, as you yourself have.... I think
that sometime before I die I would like to get inside silence, at least for a
while.”
“I was thinking about this before I came, but—it seems that you should
be able to write out katakana at least, and yet you refuse to write even a
single letter. Don't you find this at all inconvenient? If there’s something
you want done—for example, if you wrote ‘w’ for water or ‘t’ for tea ... “
“Is there some profound reason for your refusal to write?”
