Tony Takitani

Short story about Tony Takitani, the son of Shozaburo Takitani, a Japanese jazz musician who went to Shanghai before the Second World War, played in clubs and ended up in a Chinese jail. Shozaburo was one of two Japanese to leave his prison alive. He went back to Japan, married a distant cousin, who bore a child and then died. Shozaburo could not grasp what death was all about, and even forgot the baby he had left in the hospital. An American major named the child Tony. For the child, living with his name was not much fun. Kids at school called him "half-breed." A child called Tony Takitani was all it took to reopen old wounds. So Tony Takitani found it natural to be by himself. He loved to draw, and became an illustrator. His mechanical, realistic style, which bothered his teachers , proved extremely practical. Tony Takitani never had a problem finding work. He took on everything,, and made good money. By the time he was thirty-five, he had amassed a small fortune, but he never considered marriage and had no real friends, though he had perfectly normal relationships with people he saw on a daily basis. One day Tony Takitani fell in love. Twenty-two years old, she was a demure girl with a gentle smile who wore her clothes with naturalness and grace. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy. The two found they had much in common. The fifth time they met, he asked her to marry him. She didn't know whether she could call what she felt love, but she felt that he had something wonderful inside, and that she would be happy if she made her life with him. And so they married. This brought the lonely period of Tony Takitani's life to an end, but there was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. He began to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again. Their married life was free of shadows. They never fought, and spent many happy hours together, but he was concerned by her tendency to buy too many clothes. She bought a shocking number of items during their travels around Europe. He finally built a special room for her clothes. When that became too small, he told her, "I wish you would consider cutting back a little." She agreed, but this began a time of great suffering for her. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, gazing at her clothes, slipping them on and looking at herself. She simply couldn't stand it. But she loved her husband deeply. And she respected him. She brought herself to return a dress and coat, and became so distracted driving home that she was killed by a truck. Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of Size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He put an ad in the paper for a female assistant, dress Size-2, approximately five feet three, shoe size six. He asked the woman he hired to answer his phones, deliver illustrations, make copies, and to wear his wife's clothes. When the woman sees the clothes, tears well up in her eyes. "I've never see so many beautiful dresses before." She takes a week's worth home with her. Tony cannot understand why they made her cry. To him, they seemed Size-2 shadows of his wife. He tells the assistant she can keep the clothes, but she should forget about the job, and please don't tell anyone about it. Tony Takitani had a used-clothing dealer take the clothes away. For awhile, he'd just sit in the empty clothes room for an hour or two at a time, letting his mind go blank. Sometimes he could barely recall his wife's face. What he did recall was a total stranger shedding tears at the sight of the dresses his wife had left behind. Two years after his wife's death, his father died of liver cancer. Shozaburo left nothing that could be called property, just boxes of records, which Tony stacked on the floor of the empty room. A year went by, and having the records began to bother him more and more. His memories grew indistinct, but still maintained the weight that memories can have. He sold the records, and once they disappeared, Tony Takitani was really alone.

Haruki Murakami