The first time Kai saw her was at the café facing the riviera.
Kai was sitting at one of the tables outside that had a good view of the ocean, sipping his macchiato and watching the bustle on the docks. It was a beautiful, languid, sunny morning. He didn’t have much planned for the day, besides writing his paper on cosmic background radiation, which he would probably put off until Monday.
As he observed the seamen walking back and forth on the pier, he felt a light tap on his right shoulder. “Excuse me,” said a girl’s voice. “Did you drop this?”
He turned toward the voice. A young, dark-skinned woman wearing a sheer blouse and a corduroy beret was eyeing him inquiringly, holding a Shigeo Sekito vinyl record out to him.
“Oh, no, that’s not mine.” He looked around. Two tables over, an elderly couple was sharing a plate of sausages and scrambled eggs. They appeared to be off in their own little world. Kai’s gaze slid to the table diagonal from his. A man, around Kai’s age, was seated there. He had abandoned his coffee and was bent underneath the table, scanning the floor like a paleontologist would scrutinize fossil-ridden bedrock.
“It must belong to him,” Kai said, indicating the man.
“Oh.” The woman walked to the man bent under the table and tapped his shoulder, asking, “Sorry sir, did you misplace this?” The man was startled and sat up abruptly, bumping his head violently on the underside of the table. He winced in pain, but swiftly recovered and rubbed his head, chuckling. The girl laughed too. “Here,” she said.
“Ah, thank you!” He exclaimed, looking delighted to get his vinyl back.
“No problem.”
“I thought I’d placed it next to me, but next I checked, it was gone. I couldn’t find it anywhere!”
“Yeah, it was under that chair,” she said, waving a hand in Kai’s direction. She had already handed back the man’s vinyl, but lingered by his side, smiling expectantly.
“Thank you so much,” the man said again.
She beamed in response.
“Say, what’s your name?”
“Edamame.”
“Eda–edamame? Like the soybean pods?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Kai could see the perplexed expression on the man’s face. Kai was intrigued as well. He wondered why a black woman would have an Asian name, and the name of a Japanese soybean of all things. Her parents must be pretty eccentric, or at least really enjoy eating edamame, Kai decided. At any rate, it wouldn’t be polite to come right out and bluntly ask.
The man must have arrived at the same conclusion, because he didn’t pry any further and simply moved on to introducing himself. He invited her to join him for breakfast. The woman sat down across from him.
Kai listened to them exchange a few pleasantries, then returned his attention to the movements on the pier. Several sailboats were pulling away from the harbor now, and seagulls of varying shades of gray darted in and out between the masts. Waves lapped at the boats’ hulls; the waves were choppy and dark close to shore, but as the eye drifted to the horizon, the waves smoothened into a radiant, cerulean sheet, each ripple winking mischievously at the sun. The ocean sparkled very brightly, almost blindingly bright.
Kai found that he could not help but eavesdrop on the conversation the man and woman were having, near as they were. The man’s name was Stefan. He had graduated from college a month ago with a degree in Ancient History. He was going to be a curator at the local Greek museum. The woman, Edamame, owned a tortoiseshell cat. She was taking a gap year and planned to travel to Switzerland in the summer for a research opportunity at CERN.
Her hair was slightly damp still, and shimmered warmly in the sunlight.
Stefan asked her if she always washed her hair in the morning. She answered in the affirmative. The pair began to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of taking nighttime showers as opposed to daytime showers. Then, Stefan listened attentively as Edamame described her most treasured companion, her tortoiseshell cat. She never felt comfortable going somewhere without her cat, and had to hurry back home soon to check on it.
It often happened that Kai overheard the murmurings of the café patrons as he sat by himself. He never had a conversation partner of his own, so the conversations of other people filled the empty space in his mind. He had an acute sense of hearing, and when people talked, the words just flowed and splashed their way toward him and into his consciousness, without him even realizing it. Sometimes he felt like a boulder in the center of a fast mountain stream, the white current of words flowing over his slick surface without a single pause or break. Ever-molding him into an even more featureless rock surface.
When Kai finished up at the café, he took a leisurely stroll down one of the older alleyways, where the steep stairs were falling into disrepair, and clotheslines dangled out of third story windows overhead.
He made his way through a cluster of street vendors displaying their wares on what looked like a shrine to Hades.
The vendors had stacked a pyramid of pomegranates on top of a pedestal adorned with ceramic serpents. A sign on the side advertised a cheap price, written in an exquisite feminine script. The whole set-up demanded the god of the underworld’s approval. The pomegranates were large and red, in the prime of their ripeness. Kai bought one.
He carried the pomegranate with both hands and was continuing on his way when he spotted the woman from the café walking a hundred feet ahead of him. He recognized her corduroy beret. He debated if he should call out to her or not; she’d not paid him much attention at the café, but he kind of wished he’d been the one she’d chosen to sit down with, and regretted not making a more memorable first impression. He decided he should greet her, at least so he’d have one friendly face to search for the next time he went to the café.
“Hey!” He said, rather impulsively.
She didn’t react in any way. She walked forward at the same pace.
“Hey, you there!” He repeated.
She still didn’t turn around. She must have been pretending not to hear. They were the only ones on the narrow street.
He felt the heat race to his cheeks, and was terribly abashed at his own presumptuousness. He was just a stranger, after all. How would she even know his voice? She must have thought he was some creepy catcaller and was now walking faster away from him, afraid for her safety.
Kai’s chagrin was such that he didn’t see the well in front of him. One moment, he was setting his foot down on solid brick, and the next, he stepped on empty air. The ground opened up beneath him and he fell a short distance into a wide, dark hole.
He didn’t register what had happened at first. The air was dank and musty, and his eyes took a while to adjust to the sudden blackness. He dropped his pomegranate and groped around in utter oblivion, disoriented and terrified, eventually figuring out that the walls were made of plods of heavily compacted dirt, and the ground of the same organic substance.
He was thoroughly confused. He didn’t recall there being a well here in the past. And how come the woman in the beret didn’t fall down the well? She had walked this same path only seconds before. Did a sinkhole open up in the fleeting interval between her passing this point and him coming to this spot? No, that couldn’t be it. A sinkhole forming would have made a noise.
He tried feeling for a ladder on the dirt walls, but to no avail. He yelled for help. No one replied.
He wasn’t too worried. Someone was bound to amble down the street sooner or later, or look out from their apartment window, see that a man was trapped in a well, and send for help.
With nothing better to do, Kai attempted to scale the walls by digging his hands and feet into the compact dirt. However, he couldn’t get traction and slithered downward each time he gained a foot. He gave up on the endeavor and settled on the ground, clutching the pomegranate to his chest, and closed his eyes.
He had an unpleasant dream full of unnatural colors and indecipherable images.
Then, he woke up and found himself back at the table from the café in the morning, except he was sitting in a different position, and the woman called Edamame was sitting across from him, staring into his eyes, her lips moving.
He grasped that she was talking to him, yet the sounds she made didn’t form themselves into comprehensible words. In fact, he couldn’t understand a single thing she was saying even though he could hear her clearly. He listened to the elderly couple beside his table and couldn’t understand them either.
She didn’t notice his bewilderment. She spoke animatedly. It would appear to passersby that she was explaining some secret passion of hers to a dear friend.
Wait a minute, he thought. What am I doing here? Wasn’t I lying down in a well not too long ago?
He surveyed his surroundings. The sailboats were pulling out of the docks, just as before; the ocean was still a sparkling blue; the sun giving Edamame’s dark brown locks, as well as her high cheekbones, a mystical aura; and throughout the scent of coffee roasting and buttered toast wafting under Kai’s nose. It was the same morning as before. Except it wasn’t.
He was no longer strangers with this young woman, but an acquaintance. Was he her friend? Her boyfriend? He couldn’t fathom. He had never seen her before today.
He discerned that she loved talking. He hadn’t yet said a word and she was still going on about some apparently riveting topic.
“Um, I–I’m sorry,” Kai interrupted.
The woman fell silent.
“Sorry, but who are you?” Kai asked.
The woman was taken aback at first, then grinned good-naturedly. “Someone’s got a short-term memory. My name is Edamame. I told you earlier, remember?”
Kai shook his head. He knew her name already, of course, but not because she told him–she told that man who’d dropped his vinyl.
“That’s strange. You’re the first person I’ve met who’s forgotten my name that easily. It’s not hard to remember, for obvious reasons,” she said.
“But when did you tell me your name? When did we meet?” Kai asked awkwardly.
Now Edamame looked like she was genuinely concerned he might have memory loss.
She furrowed her eyebrows at him. “You invited me to have breakfast at this café earlier in the morning. After you helped me rescue my cat from the bottom of the well.”
Another Murakami-inspired bit, from February 2018. This one drew from 1Q84 and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Boy, I had a lot of time on my hands back then!
