Pushing for a Vending Machine Tour
After walking for four hours from the community center, we finally reached the apartment. The smell of my own room was nostalgic.
From what I’d seen so far, Miyagi could freely shower and eat while I slept. So I lied down and went right to sleep.
I pretended not to notice her.
She’d be sleeping there again tonight, wouldn’t she. In a position that didn’t seem like you could get any sleep in, taking a few minutes to watch and a few minutes to nap.
Just as an experiment, I sat there, imitating the way Miyagi sat, and tried to sleep. But sleep just wouldn’t come.
“That’s my line. You should sleep in bed. It’s ridiculous sleeping like this.”
“Are you still half-asleep, Mr. Kusunoki?”, Miyagi asked as if confirming my intentions.
Really, she shouldn’t have wanted to do this. Responding to my kindness could damage her tenacity as an observer, built up over years.
I supposed she was showing me respect. Or maybe she was just deathly tired.
I woke up with a red sunset filling the room. I thought Miyagi would have long been awake, but she seemed like she’d be sleeping a little longer. I got out of bed and squinted at the bright sunlight.
Then she added, “But thank you very much.”
I walked with Miyagi in the sunset. The cicadas were buzzing.
At the convenience store, I withdrew the small amount of money I had left and collected my part-time money for the month.
These would be my last war funds.
“Running out of things to do,” I said as I finished my miso soup. “I’ve done everything on my Things to Do Before I Die list. So now what?”
“Yeah, they were listening to music and reading. …But now that I think about it, those two were just means to keep living. I used music and books as a way to make a compromise with life. Now that there’s no need to force myself to keep going, they’re not so necessary as before.”
“Perhaps you should change the way you appreciate them, then. From now on, you can purely enjoy their beauty.”
A nearby man around 50 who was working through his beef bowl furrowed his brow at me for talking to myself about death.
“Do you not appreciate anything more on the simple side? …For example, do you like looking at abandoned places, or walking along tracks and counting railroad ties, or playing arcade cabinets abandoned decades ago?”
“Yes. There was even one who spent their last month lying in the back of a pickup truck and looking up at the sky. They gave all the money from selling their lifespan to an old man they didn’t know, and asked him to drive a pickup truck around places where people wouldn’t stop him.”
“Sounds peaceful. That sounds like it might be the smartest way to go, surprisingly enough.”
I tried to imagine it. Under a blue sky, down winding rural roads, feeling a comfortable breeze - going anywhere. All the memories and regrets would rise from my head and be left behind on the road. A sense of the further you go, the further away you are - much like a dying person.
“Could I hear more like that? As long as it’s nothing you can’t tell me for business reasons or secrecy,” I requested.
There was some kind of event at the middle school, and we passed by healthy, tanned kids smelling of deodorant and bug spray. It was a vivacious night that felt like pure, condensed summer.
When we got back to the apartment, I got on the Cub with Miyagi and we set out again.
After accidentally ignoring a red light, I quickly grabbed the brake, sticking us even closer to each other, and I hoped she didn’t notice my quickened pulse.
We went up the hills and parked on one that seemed to have the best view of town. I bought us two canned coffees from a vending machine, and enjoyed the meager view.
There was nothing particularly unique about these stories, so to speak, but they soothed me more than most works of literature.
The next day, as I folded more paper cranes with the remaining origami paper, I thought about what I should do. Miyagi sat at the table folding cranes, too.
I didn’t even see it right under my nose.
I guess a little mutter must have slipped out, because Miyagi looked at my face and asked “What is it?”
“Please, tell me.”
“Hmm. I don’t know if I can say for sure myself. But as a kid, I really wanted to be a vending machine when I grew up.”
“Yeah. But more than that. Cigarettes, umbrellas, charms, yaki onigiri, udon, ice, ice cream, hamburgers, oden, french fries, corned beef sandwiches, cup noodles, beer, liquor… Vending machines offer all manner of things. Japan is the land of vending machines. Because they’re good for keeping order.”
"And you thus have a love for vending machines, then.”
“Hmm, well… It’s a hobby with some individuality to it.” Miyagi tried to follow up, but it was a really stupid hobby. It wasn’t productive in the least. The symbol of a stupid, worthless life, I thought.
“But I think I do understand,” Miyagi said to cheer me up.
“No, that I don’t think I can ever understand. But, you see… vending machines are always there. So long as you provide money, they will always offer warmth. They offer more than the sum of their products. They offer a clear function, with invariance and permanence.”
“Thank you.” She bowed her head, not looking particularly pleased. “Vending machines are important to us observers as well. Unlike clerks, they don’t ignore us. …So it’s all well and good that you say you like vending machines. But what do you actually want to do, then?”
“Well, let me talk about something else I like. Every time I come to this cigarette shop, I’m reminded of Paul Auster’s "Smoke.” I really liked the thing about going in front of the cigar shop every morning without fail and repeatedly taking a photo of the same place. Getting invested in a simple thing like that felt really thrilling. …So. I want to imitate Auggie Wren, and take photos that are meaningless at a glance. Just keep taking crude photos of ordinary vending machines, in a way that anybody could do.“
"I’m not sure how to put it,” Miyagi said, “but I think I like that too.”
I bought a silver halide camera, a strap, and ten rolls of film from the thrift shop. Those were the only preparations I needed to make.
I filled up the camera with film, got on the Cub, and went around taking pictures of vending machines that caught my eye in every nook and cranny.
Every time I took a picture, I tried to get as much of the stuff that surrounded the vending machine in the finder as I could.
There were many vending machines I’d always overlooked despite how many times I’d passed them, and slight discoveries like that made my heart dance.
But I wholeheartedly did not care. This was, as someone once said it, the method most suited to me.
At the start of each day, I’d head for the photo studio and get breakfast in the thirty minutes waiting for the film to develop. At the end of each day, I’d lay the photos I developed that morning on the table, look at them with Miyagi, and carefully put each one into an album.
Kind of like the same person taking photos with them in the middle, always with the same pose and expression. Vending machines served like a measurement tool.
The owner of the photo studio seemed interested in me and how I came every morning just to develop photos of vending machines.
“So there’s someone there, is there?”
Miyagi and I looked at each other.
I didn’t expect him to believe me, but he nodded “I see,” quickly accepting Miyagi’s existence. Apparently there was the occasional strange person.
“So these strange photos, then - you’re actually taking photos of her?”, he asked.
“And will that do something good for her?”
The owner’s face told how little he understood. “Well, keep at it,” he said.
We left the shop, and I took a picture of Miyagi standing next to the tandem seat on the Cub.
“Just figured I’d take one, after what the owner said.”
“All my pictures are meaningless to others,” I said.
Of course, people like the photo studio owner - and I’d be concerned if they weren’t - were the minority.
When Miyagi stepped out and said “Sorry to make you wait,” and I closed the door behind her with an “Alright, let’s go,” he gave me a disturbed look.
Maybe that was the fundamental direction I went in when I was lost. Maybe it was a sort of homecoming instinct.
Of course, it didn’t change the fact that it was a place with vending machines. I ran the Cub down the roads taking pictures.
The candy store had closed shop a long time ago, but the red-rusted, busted vending machine that was there the first time I visited was the same as ever.
There was no sign of any people around, but there was a black cat and a brown-speckled one. The cats looked from afar, and as if sensing no danger, gradually came closer.
Miyagi stood up and walked over to the cats. The black cat ran away, and the brown-speckled cat kept its distance, then followed a few seconds later.
I followed her gaze to find the cats. They’d moved up to the top of a slide, and Miyagi seemed to like the scene.
“Yes. Are you surprised?”
“Which is why I’m practicing. And isn’t that great,” Miyagi said, proudly for some reason.
“Could you show me what you’ve drawn?”
“We should be moving on now,” she said, hurrying me along.
There was someone sitting on the Snow Brand bench in front of the store. And it was someone I knew well.
I parked the Cub on the roadside, stopped the engine, and approached the old woman on the bench.
Her response came slowly. But my voice seemed to get through to her, and she turned her eyes to me.
“Hello. You probably don’t remember me, do you?”
“It’s understandable. It was about ten years ago I last came here.”
“And though memory is so unstable like that, you still haven’t faded in my mind because of how much you helped me back then. It was a very uncommon thing. Of course, ten years ago, I was rarely grateful to people. Even when adults were nice to me, I was convinced they were just in a position where they had to be, so it wasn’t a pure act of good will. …Yes, I was a charmless child. A kid like that would even consider running away from home. When I was 8, or when I was 9, I forget exactly when, I got in a fight with my mother and left home. I’ve completely forgotten what we fought about. It must have been something stupidly trivial.”
I sat beside the old woman, leaned on the back of the bench, and gazed up at distant pylons and the clouds in the blue sky.
The old woman closed her eyes, seeming to get increasingly stiff.
"If you’ve forgotten about me, then I’m sure you’ve forgotten about Himeno too. I always came along to the shop with her. …Like her name implies, she was like a princess out of a fairy tale. I don’t mean any offense, but her unique beauty was something that seemed entirely unfitting for this town. Both Himeno and I were black sheep at school. I was probably just hated because I was a snot-nosed kid. But I think Himeno was hated because she was just so different. …I know it’s rude of me, but I can’t help but feel gratitude for that. Because by being driven away from the group, Himeno and I ended up together. Just having Himeno by my side, I could handle all the bullying from everyone else. I could think that, at any rate, they treated Himeno and I the same way.”
Every time I said “Himeno,” the old woman seemed to show just the slightest reaction. Pleased by this, I continued.
“In the summer of fourth grade, Himeno had to change schools because of her parents changing jobs. That served as a trigger for my image of her being increasingly deified. I used her remark about "being together if we hadn’t found anyone by 20” as a prop for ten whole years. But just the other day, I learned that Himeno’s fondness for me, once a certain point had passed, turned into a vicious hate. She’d even planned to commit suicide before my eyes. …Then later, I suddenly remembered. Just before I reunited with Himeno, I went by myself to dig up a time capsule that our class had filled with letters and buried back in elementary school. I knew that I really shouldn’t have, but I was going to die very soon due to some circumstances, so I thought I should be allowed at least that.“
Now.
But right then, everything started to come together in my mind.
“When I was 17, I received a single letter from Himeno. There was nothing particularly important about what was written in the letter itself. It was just enough that I was the recipient, and Himeno was the sender. She was never the sort of person to write letters to others or call them, no matter how friendly she was with them. So the moment a letter from her arrived… I should have realized.”
Yes.
That parting word was the only thing she said to me.
But at the time, I completely overlooked a certain possibility.
The girl who was always beside me, providing support as I experienced every form of disappointment.
The girl who made up for what she lacked in courtesy with incredibly sweet concern.
“Mr. Kusunoki? Mr. Kusunoki.”
“I just remembered. I’ve been on this road a long time ago. Long before I became an observer. …If you follow the road a bit more, then make a right turn somewhere and go straight, you’ll arrive at Starry Lake.”
“The lake I told you I would want to visit again before I died. I don’t know what it’s officially called.”
“Now wasn’t that something good?”
“Do you think you have enough gas?”
It was already past midnight. We went up a mountain trail, resting the engine where necessary, and arrived at what she called Starry Lake after about half an hour.
After buying cup ramen from the nearby convenience store and eating it on the bench outside, I stopped the Cub in the parking area ahead and walked down a mostly unlit road.
“You don’t want to show me until the very end, huh?”
I’d thought the noises of the summer bugs were all one sound, but I was able to make out four different types. Lowly-buzzing bugs, shrilly high-pitched bugs, bugs with bird-like voices standing out at once, and ear-hurting frog-sounding bugs.
“Outrageous how?”
“I didn’t consider it, and I’m not gonna.”
“Can’t see any reason why you’d do something like that.”
“Stop, keeping your eyes closed,” Miyagi said as she let go of my hand. “Watch your step, but lie down flat. And then you may open your eyes.”
Maybe I should put it this way - that day, I learned what the stars looked like for the first time.
I had “seen” the stars via books and television. I knew of a sky which contained the Summer Triangle, through which the Milky Way ran, which looked like a sputtering of ink.
The sight before my eyes was something much, much bigger than what I’d imagined. It was like a falling snow whose flakes radiated a powerful light.
I said to Miyagi beside me, “I feel like I understand why you’d want to see this again before you died.”
We saw three shooting stars. I wondered what I’d wish for when I saw the next one.
I didn’t have any thoughts of getting my lifespan back at this point. I didn’t want to meet Himeno, and I didn’t want to turn back time. I didn’t have the energy in me to start things over.
Her existence ignored by everyone, with only her subjects to acknowledge her… I could see her dying within a year. As much endurance as Miyagi had, it in no way meant she could survive thirty years of that life.
“Miyagi,” I voiced. “You’ve lied for my sake, haven’t you? Lies like how Himeno barely remembered me.”
I spoke while trying to remember. “That being, the "person who was important to you” you mentioned once?“
I waited in silence, and Miyagi slowly began.
“I once had someone in my life who was to me as Ms. Himeno was to you. We could never feel accustomed to living in this world, so we relied on each other, and lived in our own world of mutual dependency. …After becoming an observer, the first thing I did on my first day off was to go check on him. I thought that he would have been terribly sad about my disappearance. He would have retreated into his shell, waiting for me to return - I did not question it wouldn’t be so. …However, in a few weeks without me, he had quickly adapted to a world without me. No, not that; a mere month after I vanished, he had assimilated into this world in the same way as those who’d rejected us as "different.”“
Miyagi looked at the sky again, and a warm smile came to her lips.
“Yes. Because I don’t know anything else. In the end of it all, that’s the only thing I can cling to.”
“Nah,” I said. “Thanks for understanding.”
Miyagi dove into my bed, claiming “only because today was so tiring.” When I tried to sneak a look at Miyagi, she appeared to be doing the same, so we both hastily looked away, and slept facing opposite to each other.
I should have wished on a shooting star that things could go on like this.
When I next woke, Miyagi was gone. Only her notebook remained by the bed.