It was about a week ago that a man named Nonaka said something to me. Mr. Nonaka is around fifty, and he works in the Sanitation Division. Normally he’s in Government Building Number One. But from time to time he’ll make up an excuse to come by the day-care section in the Annex—which everyone refers to as the Outpost Office—and he and the section chief in my department will share a laugh or two. Whenever he stops by, he uses the opportunity to cast furtive glances in my direction.
I believe that he and the chief are on the same baseball team. The chief plays shortstop and Mr. Nonaka plays second base, or something like that. I don’t much care what they do, it just makes me angry to see someone from a completely unrelated office coming over here during office hours for no better reason than to chat. “Mr. Nonaka’s got his eye on you!” says my colleague, Ms. Mizusawa, who’s eight years younger than I am. She’s started teasing me, and this has made me even more disgusted.
Mr. Nonaka always wears a gray windbreaker, and his complexion is brown and his skin dry, probably from all the cigarettes he smokes. He has a greasy glint in his eye, and whenever he stares at me, I can feel his black eyes scorching holes in me, just as if someone had pressed a hot brand against my skin. It makes me feel queasy. And then Mr. Nonaka said, “When you talk, your voice is high-pitched, but when you laugh it’s low. Eee-hee-hee-hee. That’s how you laugh.” And then he went on to say things like, “You may be polished and proper on the outside, but inside you’re downright dirty, aren’t you?” I was completely caught off guard. What would give this complete stranger the right to come and say something like that to me? I’m sure my dismay showed on my face. Mr. Nonaka looked over at the chief with some confusion, and then they went out somewhere together.
“What Mr. Nonaka said sounded like sexual harassment to me,” I complained later to my section chief, and a look of embarrassment washed over his face. Oh, I see what’s going on here! I thought. Just because I’ve got foreign blood in my veins, you think I’m more argumentative than a normal Japanese! Leave it to the Westerner to file a lawsuit, right?
“I agree that it wasn’t appropriate to say what he did to a coworker,” the section chief said, after some deliberation, making it sound as if it wasn’t cause for concern. And then he started shuffling the papers on his desk, trying to look like he was putting them in order. I didn’t want to start an argument, so I didn’t say anything more. If I had, it would have just made him angry with me.
I hadn’t brought a lunch with me, so I decided to go to the cafeteria in Building Number One, which was only a short walk away. I don’t like being where people gather, so I seldom go there. But the building is new and has a very nice food hall for employees. A bowl of ramen is only ¥240, and you can get the lunch special for ¥480. The food was supposed to be good too.
I was shaking pepper over the bowl of ramen on my tray when my section chief came up behind me.
“You’ll make it too spicy with all that pepper!” He had the lunch special on his tray: fried fish and cooked cabbage. The dried bonito flakes sprinkled atop the cabbage looked like metal shavings, and the cabbage reminded me of bigos. Scenes from my childhood played across my memory: the dinner table in our mountain cabin—silent as death, my mother looking miserable and my father eating with wordless gusto. Caught up in my memories, I must have spaced out for a minute, but the section chief didn’t seem to notice. “Shall we sit over there?” he asked, smiling.
The section chief is forty-two, and because he plays catch during his lunch break he comes to work every day in his sports gear and pads up and down the hall the rest of the day in sneakers that squish when he walks. He’s the kind of guy who is constantly concerned with his physique, is perpetually tanned, and is so full of vigor it’s depressing. I usually don’t get on well with men like that, but I found myself slipping into my usual habit. What would our child look like, if we were to have one?
If the child were a girl, she would have my fair skin. Her face, a melding of the section chief’s square-cut chin with my oval face, would be attractively round. She would have the chief’s slightly upturned nose and my brown eyes, and she would inherit his sloping shoulders. Her arms and legs would be sturdy for a girl, but given her vitality they’d be fairly charming. I was pleased.
I followed the chief to the table. The enormous cafeteria was filled with the chatter of employees and the clatter of cafeteria workers bustling in and out with trays and other utensils, but I felt they were all watching me. Ever since the incidents with Yuriko and Kazue, everyone knows everything. I couldn’t stand thinking that they were staring at me.
The chief peered into my face. “About what happened earlier,” he began. “Mr. Nonaka didn’t mean anything by it. He was just trying to be friendly, I suppose. If that’s sex-harass”—he used an abbreviation—“then half of what any man says would qualify, right? Don’t you think so?”
He was grinning at me. His teeth were short, like those of plant-eating dinosaurs, or so I thought as I gazed at his mouth. I was reminded of the illustration of the Cretaceous Period. Our child would probably have a row of teeth like that. If she did, the shape of her mouth would be inelegant. Her fingers and her knuckles would be conspicuously stubby and, on her large hands, would be too angular for a girl. The child that the section chief and I would have had been cute earlier, but now she had transformed into something else completely. And I was growing angrier by the minute.
“Sexual harassment, I’ll have you know, also includes assassinating another person’s character in that way.”
My protest was delivered rapid-fire, but the section chief countered in measured tones. “Mr. Nonaka was not assassinating your character. He simply stated his observation that your spoken voice and your laughing voice are different, that’s all. Now clearly it’s not appropriate to tease someone that way, so let me apologize for him. Will you let it go? Please?”
“All right.”
I acquiesced. I didn’t think there was any point in continuing the discussion. There are perceptive people and there are dimwits. The section chief fell into the latter category.
He chewed his fried fish with his short little teeth, the thick coating of batter scattering over his plate with a dull rustling sound. He asked some harmless noninvasive questions about my workload as a part-timer. I answered perfunctorily. And then suddenly he lowered his voice.
“I heard about your younger sister. That must have been awful.”
This is what he said, but what he meant was that, on account of Yuriko, I must be particularly sensitive to what others say and do. I’ve met his type any number of times—the kind of man who thinks he can get away with pretending to know how I feel. I pushed the white onions that were floating on top of my ramen aside with my chopsticks and said nothing. Onions smell, so I hate them.
“I didn’t know a thing about it; boy, was I shocked! Wasn’t her killer the same man who was arrested in that Office Lady Murder last year?”
I glared at the section chief’s face. The corners of his eyes were turned down and virtually dripped with curiosity. The child that I would have with the section chief had now become crude and hideously ugly.
“It’s still under investigation. They can’t say anything conclusive.”
“I heard she was your friend. Is that right?”
“She was a classmate.” Had Kazue and I ever been friends? I would have to give that idea further consideration.
“I’m really interested in the O.L. Murder, as they call it. I suspect you hear that from a lot of people. It just boggles the mind. What would drive her to do something so shocking? How could she have had such dark impulses? I mean, wasn’t she a career woman employed by some construction-firm think tank in Otemachi? And a graduate of Q University on top of it. Why would such an elite professional become caught up in prostitution? You must know something about it.”
So there it was! Yuriko had already been forgotten. If a woman who is beautiful but has no other redeeming value turns
tricks until she’s ancient, no one gives it a second thought. But Kazue’s turn to prostitution left everyone racking their brains to figure out why. A career woman by day, a prostitute by night. Men everywhere were beside themselves trying to work that one out. That the section chief would lay bare his curiosity in this way struck me as particularly offensive. He must have noticed my expression because he began to stammer out an apology.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m being callous.” And then he added, as a joke, “It’s not sex-harass, so please don’t be angry!”
Our conversation shifted to his Sunday baseball games. When he invited me to come watch one sometime I nodded appropriately and finished my ramen, making every effort to appear nonchalant. Finally, I understood. Mr. Nonaka wasn’t interested in me. He was interested in the Yuriko-Kazue scandal. Wherever I go those scandals pursue me.
And just when I thought I had finally found a worthwhile job! I was tired of this worrisome chain of events at my workplace, but I didn’t feel like resigning. It wasn’t just the job. It was that a whole year had passed since I’d started working there, and I found comfort in the regularity of the hours.
After I graduated from the university and before I took the job at the P Ward Office, I did all kinds of things. I worked for a while in a convenience store, and I went door-to-door trying to sell subscriptions to a monthly study guide. Marriage? No. I never gave it a moment’s thought. I’m really proud to be a middle-aged, part-time, unattached freelancer.
That night, before I went to bed, I fantasized about the child I would have with Mr. Nonaka. I even drew a picture of it on the back of an advertisement leaflet. The child was a boy with very dry skin. He had Mr. Nonaka’s fat gabby lips and short stocky legs that made him swagger when he walked. From my side he took big, bright white teeth and tapered ears. I was pleased to see that the boy’s features gave him a demonic look. And then I thought about what Mr. Nonaka had said to me. “When you talk, your voice is high-pitched, but when you laugh it’s low. Eee-hee-hee-hee. That’s how you laugh.”
His observation had shocked me; I’d never paid attention to my own laughing voice. And so I tried laughing there by myself. It’ll probably come as no surprise that the laugh I produced was hardly natural. I wondered which parent my laughter resembled. But I don’t have any recollection of either my father or my mother ever laughing, so there was no way to judge. This was because the two of them never really laughed much. Yuriko, too, never raised her voice in laughter. She simply smiled mysteriously, maybe because she knew smiling showed her beauty to greatest effect. What a strange family! Suddenly the events of one winter day came flooding back.
• 3 •
Let’s see. I’m thirty-nine years old now, so it must have been twenty-seven years ago. We spent our New Year’s family vacation in our mountain cabin in Gunma; I suppose I should call it our “vacation cottage.” It was just an ordinary house, no different from the surrounding farmhouses, but my father and mother always referred to it as our mountain cabin, so that was what I called it too.
When I was little, I could hardly wait for our weekends at the cabin. But once I entered junior high it became a real hassle. I hated the way the people there made such a fuss over my sister and me and our family—silently comparing us to each other. It was mostly the local farmers. Still, I couldn’t very well stay behind by myself in Tokyo over the New Year’s vacation, so off I went to Gunma—reluctantly—in the car my father drove. I was in my first year of junior high; Yuriko was in sixth grade.
Our cabin was in a small enclave of about twenty or so vacation homes of varying sizes and styles clustered at the foot of Mount Asama. With the exception of one third-generation Japanese family, almost all the houses were owned by foreign businessmen who had Japanese wives. Although an unwritten rule, it was as if Japanese people were not allowed in. In sum, it was a village where Western men married to Japanese women could escape their stifling Japanese companies and come to catch their breath. There must have been some other interracial children like my sister and me, but either they were already grown up or they weren’t living in Japan, because we rarely saw any young people. That New Year’s we were the only children, as usual.
On New Year’s Eve my family and I went to a nearby mountain to ski. On our way back we stopped by a hot spring with an outdoor bath. As always this was my father’s idea. He seemed to enjoy startling people with his foreign presence.
The outdoor bath was built alongside a river. The pool in the middle was for mixed bathing, but there were pools on either side partitioned off for single-sex use. The women’s side of the bath was surrounded by a bamboo hedge, so you couldn’t see in from the outside. As soon as we started taking off our clothes in the changing area, I began to hear the murmurs.
“Look at that girl.”
“Why, she looks just like a doll!”
In the changing room, in the passage to the bath, and even from within the steam of the bath waters, the women whispered among themselves. Old women stared openly at Yuriko without the least bit of reservation, and young women made no attempt to hide the shock on their faces as they nudged one another with their elbows. Children, too, went out of their way to draw closer and stare with their mouths agape at the naked Yuriko. That’s always the way it was.
Ever since she was a baby, Yuriko had been used to being ogled by perfect strangers. She’d strip naked without the slightest hesitation. Her body was still undeveloped and childlike, showing not the slightest suggestion of breasts. But even so, with her tiny little face and her fair complexion, she looked just like a Barbie doll. To me she looked like she was wearing a mask.
I had planned to take off my clothes, fold them carefully, and then walk down the narrow passage to the open-air bath while everyone was fixated on Yuriko.
“Is she your daughter?” a middle-aged woman sitting in a chair suddenly called out to my mother. She must have steeped herself too long in the hot waters of the bath because she looked hot sitting there, fanning her pink flesh with her damp towel.
Mother’s hands stopped midair as she was pulling off her clothing.
“Is your husband a foreigner?” The woman glanced in my direction. I lowered my eyes and said nothing. The idea of pulling my underwear off was now disconcerting. I wasn’t like Yuriko. I was sick and tired of being the object of curious stares. If I’d been by myself, I wouldn’t have been so obvious. But thanks to the fact that I was there with the monster Yuriko, I couldn’t slip by unnoticed. The woman kept pushing the point.
“So, I take it your husband’s not Japanese?”
“That is correct.”
“Well, that explains it! I’ve never seen such a pretty girl!”
“Thank you.” A wave of pride flashed across my mother’s face.
“But it must be odd to have a kid who doesn’t look a thing like you.”
The woman muttered this casually as if she were speaking to herself. My mother’s face fell. “Hurry,” she said to me and gave my back a soft poke. When I saw how her face had hardened, I knew the woman’s words had hit home.
Outside, night had fallen and the stars were out. The air had turned cold. A cloud of white steam hovered over the bath. I was unable to see the bottom of the pool; it looked eerie, like a black pond. There was something glittery and white out in the middle.
Yuriko was floating on her back in the steamy water, looking up at the sky. Women and children, submerged in water up to their shoulders, surrounded her and stared at her wordlessly. I looked at Yuriko’s face and was horrified. I had never seen her look more beautiful. She was almost godlike. It was the first time I had ever had that experience. She seemed to be more an effigy than a human being, too beautiful to be a creature of this world.
Mother called out, “Yuriko, dear?”
“Mother?”
Yuriko’s clear voice rang out over the water, and the eyes that had been trained on her suddenly shifted to me and my mother. They returned to Yuriko once again and then pivote
d back to me: eyes that were busy comparing, their curiosity overflowing. I knew it would not take long for them to determine which of us was the superior and which the inferior. Yuriko wanted those around her to see that she was nothing like her mother and older sister, and that is why she had answered when Mother called. That’s the way my younger sister was. Yes, you’re right. I never once felt any love for Yuriko. And my mother without a doubt had to do regular battle with the odd feeling that the pink woman had just mentioned.
I stared at Yuriko’s face. Her brown hair clung to her exceptionally white forehead. Her brows arched in a bow. And her large eyes slanted downward slightly. Child though she was, the bridge of her nose was straight and perfectly formed. Her lips were plump, just like a doll’s. Even among interracial children, a face as perfectly proportioned as Yuriko’s was hard to find.
As for me, my eyes turned upward and my nose was as aquiline as my father’s. To top it off, my body was squat and pudgy like my mother’s. Why were we so different? I couldn’t figure out how Yuriko had managed to inherit a face that was so superior to that of both her parents. I searched madly for some trace of them in her features, but no matter how hard I looked, I could only conclude that she was some kind of mutation.
Yuriko turned back to look at me. Strangely, the beauty that earlier had been so incredible that it seemed divine had now suddenly vanished. Without thinking, I let out a scream.
Startled, my mother turned toward me. “What’s wrong?”
“Mother, Yuriko’s face is creepy!”
I had suddenly noticed what it was: Yuriko’s eyes gave off no light. Even a doll’s eyes will have a white dot painted in the center to suggest light, won’t they? As a result, a doll’s face is sweet and charming, yet Yuriko’s eyes were dark ponds. The reason she had looked so beautiful floating in the bath was because the light from the stars had been reflected in her eyes.
Grotesque Page 2