What Would You Do?

What he was was sixty-two kilograms of raw fish and rice wine, and that was it. He introduced himself in much the same way if at all he met someone new, in the manner of a certain kind of thoughtful person who in their schooling years was told that anything was possible in the future if only he applied himself, and had been let down.

It was sixty-two kilograms and dropping. He could not now say whether this was his fault or the fault of that nebulous scapegoat that colleagues in other cubicles called society. The pay slips he took home remained constant as the passing of the clouds, but all around him the things he could have shrunk. He had tried to seek other work, other futures, all in vain.

On occasion he dreamt darker thoughts. When his head was clearer he would go on days off to the park; if the weather was fine and the season mild, cherry blossoms bloomed overhead; he would take out a picnic spread and lay there. He dreamt of the years in which he had been told that anything was possible; he dreamt of times when he was asked to fill out papers asking what he wanted to be in the future. Always these forms were handed out at the moment of the year when the sun grew hotter and cicadas cried - a circumstance that made imagination duller if only because of the heat.

He remembered a time when the form that was handed out was not a form, but a question.

"What would you do," it asked, "if you had a million yen?"

It had come by way of a bespectacled teacher who, by the twinkle in her eye and the oddity of her dress and the queerness of her gait, seemed unlikely to stay for much longer than the time it took the leaves to turn orange. There was a word for such creatures -- she herself had said it, perhaps -- "libertine". Nevertheless she met the quizzical looks of her students with a smile and said that it was a sort of test. "A million yen is a million yen," she said. "A drop in the ocean. A wave in the tide. A tsunami on the shoreline."

"You can do everything with a million yen," she said. "or you could do nothing."

He dreamt back to the answer he might have given. He thought of the boy he once had been, buried in letters and numbers which he had been told were the key to applying himself. Perhaps he might have reasoned that it was so little that all he might have done was to make a small trip or cover a shortfall; perhaps he might have argued that then, the value lay not in what that little could do.

He dreamt of the way she smiled, and said to hold the answer close to his heart.

Nonetheless it was the past. In the present he stood, and continued on. He continued to introduce himself in such a way as he now did, and when the first snow fell, the number fell to sixty, then fifty-eight, then fifty-six...

He continued to dream darker thoughts, and so it was that on a day when the snow fell gentle, he went out again into the park, and found himself at the edge of the river, and found the answer to the question that he was asked.

"If I had a million yen," he told himself, "I would ask for little back but to meet someone like that again."

And he stepped into the river, and allowed it to carry him, quietly, into the spring of a different life.