Grotesque

by Natsuo Kirino

  “Wow, I’ve never earned this much before!”

  She fanned the bills out in front of me. It was the money I had left on the desk.

  “Why did you bring that? That’s not Yu Wei’s money!”

  “Don’t be silly. We can’t make our getaway without money!”

  Mei-kun stuffed the bills away in her brand-name shoulder bag.

  “I’ll be charged with a crime.”

  Mei-kun paid no attention. In the brief four months since we had parted at Guangzhou Station, my sister had changed. I gazed at her profile—the profile of the little sister I had loved. Her nose was slightly upturned. Her lips were slightly crooked, her face plump and adorable. Without thinking I wanted to hug her slender body. She was so beautiful and her heart was so wicked.

  I was certain we were running off with Lou-zhen’s money, a crime that was going to stick to me like a wet shirt. My heart grew heavy. In some ways, the pink T-shirt I had left behind symbolized everything that had happened to me. It was the innocence that had once belonged to Mei-kun and myself. I had forgotten it in Lou-zhen’s room. And I would live without ever getting it back.

  When we dashed through the lobby, I saw a man sitting on a sofa in a Hawaiian shirt smoking a cigarette. He looked up in alarm when he heard us approach. It was Jin-long. He was wearing sunglasses but there could be no doubt. He leaped to his feet and chased after us. “Taxi!” I called impatiently to the doorman. And so the two of us made our painful exit from Guangzhou.

  All right, Detective Takahashi has just reprimanded me for writing too much about unrelated matters. I’ve been given a precious opportunity to write about the crime that I committed. I killed a woman I did not even know, and I should be reflecting on my own stupidity in this testament. But here I am going on about my own trivial upbringing and all the shameful activities that I became involved in. I apologize to you, Detective Takahashi, and to you, Your Honor, for forcing you to read this long and insignificant ramble.

  However, I have written about the life I led back in my home country because I want you to understand that all I ever wanted was the chance to earn the kind of money I would need to live independently and comfortably without having to resort to unseemly behavior. And yet, here I am in prison all the same—forced to endure day in and day out the constant questioning by detectives and even made to suffer the humiliation of being suspected of murdering Kazue Sat. I had no part whatsoever in her death. I have made this very clear on numerous occasions. But let me state it once again for the record: I had nothing to do with Kazue Sat’s murder. I don’t know anything about her, and so I cannot write about her here. Detective Takahashi has told me to write only what I know about the crimes under consideration, so I will hurry to complete my account.

  You needed a pass to enter the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, which of course we did not have. So we decided to settle first in Dongguan City, which was a small municipality not far away, and set about looking for work. Known as a second border zone, Dongguan is prosperous, and the Chinese who work over in Shenzhen can afford to throw their money around. Interestingly, the Chinese nationals who live in Hong Kong think that prices in Shenzhen are cheaper, so they come over to the city to shop and enjoy themselves. The Chinese who live in Shenzhen have the same opinion of Dongguan City, because Dongguan is close to one of the Special Economic Zones. Mei-kun found a job babysitting the children of women who worked in hostess bars, and I got work at a cannery.

  I think that period was the happiest in my life. The two of us lived in harmony, helping each other out just like husband and wife, and after nearly two years of hard work we had saved up enough money to buy permits for Shenzhen. We moved there in 1991.

  We succeeded in landing jobs at the best karaoke club in Shenzhen. Mei-kun worked as a hostess and I was an assistant manager. Mei-kun is the one who helped me get the job. She’d been scouted earlier, and she said she’d work on condition that they hire me. I wasn’t particularly fond of the idea of her working as a hostess. It made me uncomfortable because I felt it would be too easy for her to slip back into prostitution. Mei-kun, for her part, worried that I would fall for one of the other girls who worked in the club. So we kept an eye on each other as we worked, a very peculiar state of affairs for a brother and sister.

  Why did I come to Japan? It’s a question I am frequently asked. My younger sister was, as always, the one to determine my fate. To be perfectly honest, I had always been keen on moving to America. But Mei-kun was strongly opposed. In America, Chinese laborers are taken advantage of and paid only one dollar an hour. But in Japan we could earn more, save it, and then move to America with our savings. Mei-kun’s logic always won out over my weak-willed indecisiveness. I did not agree with her, but as usual I was not able to stand up to her.

  One day, something happened that persuaded me to head to Japan sooner rather than later. The club owner called me to his office.

  “A man came by from Guangzhou looking for a fellow named Zhang from Sichuan. It looks like he’s been asking around all over the place. Are you the one he’s after?”

  “There are a lot of people from Sichuan named Zhang,” I answered nonchalantly without batting an eye. “What does the man want?”

  “He said it had something to do with Tiananmen. It seems he’s offering a reward.”

  “What did he look like?

  “He was with a woman. The man was a mean-looking bastard, and the woman had beady little eyes.”

  The owner of the club, who did not like trouble, eyed me suspiciously. Lou-zhen had sent Yu Wei and Bai Jie to look for us. I could feel the blood drain from my face, and I struggled to maintain my composure. If they were offering a reward, it wouldn’t be long before someone gave us up. Everyone working in Shenzhen was after money.

  That night when I got back to our apartment, I discussed the situation with Mei-kun. She raised her eyebrows.

  “To tell the truth, I didn’t tell you, Zhe-zhong, but the other day I saw a guy in front of the station who looked just like Jin-long. I’ve been terrified that he’d show up at the club sooner or later. Our luck may have run out here.”

  The karaoke club where we were employed was expensive and well known. It wasn’t the kind of club that inlanders frequented. Most of the clientele were from Hong Kong or Japan. I didn’t think it was likely that Jin-long would come by, but Shenzhen wasn’t that large. We were bound to run into him sooner or later. Things were getting dangerous for us here.

  The next day I began searching for a snakehead—a smuggler—to help us get to Japan. If we went to Shanghai, I assumed we could find any number of snakeheads willing to get us away from Jin-long. But Lou-zhen was another story. Her younger brother lived in Shanghai and it’s not likely there’d be many willing to tangle with the authority she could bring to bear. This wasn’t going to be easy. And then a hostess from Changle in Fujian Province told me about a snakehead she knew there. I called him immediately and asked him to smuggle us into Japan.

  The snakehead wanted a down payment of only ¥1,000,000 to cover the cost of two forged passports. The rest of the money we would pay once we got to Japan and started working—an additional ¥2,000,000 per person. The total charge, therefore, would be ¥5,000,000. I let out a sigh of relief. Ever since I learned we were being hunted, I was so busy looking over my shoulder, it was like I had a permanent crick in my neck.

  February 9, 1992: I will never forget that day for as long as I live. That was the day we set sail for Japan. Completely by coincidence, it was on the same date three years earlier that Mei-kun and I had fled from our village. Only someone who has traveled on that journey into this country can possibly understand the dangers my countrymen and I faced. And when I think of my sister’s death, I am overcome with bitterness. I’ve not wanted to talk about this to anyone, so I will keep my account brief and without great detail.

  Forty-nine of us boarded the boat. Most were young men from Fujian Province. A few women Mei-kun’s age were also aboard. Th
ey were married, I surmised, by the way they sat close to their male companions, their eyes downcast. Terrified of the dangerous sea voyage that now confronted them, they were nevertheless determined not to be a burden to their husbands. But Mei-kun was unfazed. She took out her brown-covered passport again and again and stroked it happily, the passport she had thought she would never get.

  The first boat we boarded was small, a regular fishing boat. We sailed out of Changle harbor squeezed rail to rail in the hold. The seas were calm and the weather warm. I let out a sigh of relief. But once we pulled away from shore and entered the high seas, the winds grew strong. The boat was buffeted mercilessly by rough waves. Finally we reached a large freighter. The captain of our boat handed each of us a screwdriver and told us to board the ship. I had no idea what we were supposed to do with the screwdriver, but I clambered onto the deck.

  When we were all aboard, we were led into a narrow wooden container. They closed it up so no one could tell from outside that it contained people. It was pitch black inside. And with forty-nine people crammed into such a narrow space, the air soon grew stale and thick.

  “Poke holes in the sides with your screwdrivers,” I heard someone shout. The sound of pounding that arose all around me was freakish as everyone worked feverishly to pierce airholes in the side of the container. I banged on my part with all my might, but no matter how I tried I managed to bore a hole that was only a quarter of an inch wide. I stuck my mouth to the hole and sucked in the fresh air. I wouldn’t die. Gradually the panic I had felt over the prospect of suffocating abated. It wasn’t long, however, before we were all covered in stench. At first we had designated a corner of the container for our personal business, but by the second day, practically the entire bottom was covered in waste. Mei-kun, who had started the trip in such a buoyant mood, grew taciturn. She clung to my hand and refused to leave my side. Mei-kun was claustrophobic.

  On the fourth day of our voyage, the ship’s engine stopped. We could hear the crew running busily around the deck. We had reached Taiwan. But because no one told us anything, I thought we’d probably gotten to Japan.

  Mei-kun, who had been leaning listlessly against me, nauseated with seasickness on top of claustrophobia, suddenly sat up and grabbed my coat with great intensity.

  “Are we in Japan?”

  “Maybe.”

  I wasn’t sure, so I shrugged uncertainly. But Mei-kun leaped to her feet and began busily combing her hair, barely able to suppress her joy. If we’d had more light in the container, I’m sure she would have put on makeup. But after a solid day, the ship still remained at anchor. No one came for us. Mei-kun could not sit still. She kept getting up and running her hands over the wall of the container, slapping it fiercely with her palms.

  “Let me out!”

  One of the men from Fujian Province who had been squatting in the dark spoke to me in a husky whisper. “You need to settle her down. This is just Taiwan.”

  When Mei-kun heard the word Taiwan she was horrified. “I don’t care if it is Taiwan. I have to get out. I can’t take this anymore! Somebody help me!” She began banging on the walls of the container, screaming hysterically.

  “Hey, do something with your woman. If they hear her we’ll all be fucked.”

  I should have been gentler, but I could feel forty-seven pairs of eyes boring into my back, and I struck Mei-kun across the face to silence her. As soon as I hit her, she collapsed just like a puppet with its strings snapped. She fell where the floor was filthy with vomit and feces and lay there, faceup, her eyes staring into the darkness. I worried when she didn’t move, but I couldn’t allow Mei-kun to endanger the lives of all the others in the container. As long as she was quiet, I thought it best to leave her where she was. Later, when I looked back on this horrible tragedy, I could not believe that I might have ended Mei-kun’s life with just a smack across the face. Not Mei-kun. She was so strong, so determined.

  The next day the ship finally sailed out of Taiwan. It slowly plied the rough winter seas on its way to Japan. Mei-kun lay just where she was, a semi-invalid, neither eating nor speaking. On the sixth day they finally opened the container. The air off the seas was cold, nearly freezing. But after being closed up in the dank stench of the container, it felt clean and exhilarating. I gulped in giant breaths of the air. Mei-kun managed to stand up on her own, feeble though she was. She looked at me and smiled weakly.

  “That was awful.”

  I would not have believed in a million years that those would be Mei-kun’s last words, but less than twenty minutes later, as we boarded a small boat that would carry us through the darkness to the Japanese shores, the accident occurred. For some reason, the second Mei-kun set foot on the boat, the sea, which had up to that moment been placid, surged mysteriously into a huge wave. Mei-kun tumbled into the water before anyone could catch hold of her. I had boarded the boat ahead of her and tried to grasp her hand but it all happened too quickly. When I reached out to her, my hand clutched nothing but air. As she slipped into the sea, Mei-kun looked up at me with an expression of utter shock. And then she disappeared beneath the waves. Her hand moved back and forth for a second—as if she were waving good-bye—and all I could do was stare after it in a daze. Even if I had tried to help her, I couldn’t swim. I screamed her name. But there was nothing anyone could do. We just stared at the dark water. My darling little sister died in the cold midwinter seas, the Japan she had so longed for drifting just before her eyes.

  I am now nearly finished with my long and rambling tale. Detective Takahashi, Your Honor, please indulge me and read on to the end. Detective Takahashi titled this account “My Crimes” and instructed me to reflect on my wrongful behavior by writing about my upbringing and all my past mistakes. Now, as so many different memories come to mind, I am choked by tears of regret. Truly I am a despicable man. I was unable to rescue Mei-kun, I murdered Yuriko Hirata, and I have continued to live comfortably. How I wish I could go back in time and start all over. Once again I could become the boy I was when I left home with my little sister. How bright the future looked to me then, how full of promise! And yet all I have to show for it now is this crime. A horrible crime only a reprehensible creature could have committed. I killed the first woman I met in this foreign country. I believe I ended up becoming this evil person because I lost Mei-kun, my very soul.

  An illegal alien in Japan, I lived like a stray cat, dodging here and there, constantly afraid of inviting the attention of others. Chinese people are accustomed to close-knit communities, never living far from home and depending on the support and guidance of family members. But here I was many miles from home and family. I had no one to help me find a job or a place to live; I had to do that all by myself. And when I lost my sister, I had no one to console me. After three years of hard work, I was finally able to pay off the snakehead for the money he’d fronted in getting my sister and me to Japan. But after that I had very little else to aim for, and I lost even the will to save money. Most of the other men I knew in Japan had wives and children back in China and were working to send money to them. I envied them.

  Around that time I met a Taiwanese woman who was working in Kabuki-ch. I just wrote that Hirata was the first woman I met in Japan, but actually I went with this Taiwanese woman to see the movie Yellow Earth. She was ten years older than I and had two children she’d left in Kaohiung. While she was working as the mama of a club, she attended a Japanese-language school and saved her money to send back to her children. She was a very gentle person and took great care of me when I was feeling desperate.

  But no matter how gentle a person is, if the upbringing is different, that person cannot know how you truly feel. She could not really understand what it was like to be brought up in such an impoverished village and then to have suffered the hardships of migrant labor and the agony of losing a sister. This annoyed me, and eventually I separated from her. It was at that point that I decided to set my sights on traveling by myself to America.

  A
stray has no choice but to live like a stray. Even though I shared lodgings with several others in the apartment at Shinsen, we were all, each in our own way, loners. I didn’t even know that Chen-yi and Huang were fugitives until I heard it from Detective Takahashi. If I’d known they were criminals, I certainly would have had nothing to do with them. The reason I started to fall out with the other men I lived with was because I was secretly planning my trip to New York. It wasn’t simply a disagreement over money.

  Detective Takahashi has criticized me for extorting the apartment rent from my companions. I was responsible for renting the apartment from Chen. I had to make sure the apartment was clean and in order and I had to cover the cost of the utilities. So it only made sense that they paid more. Who do you think cleaned the toilet? Who took out the trash? I did all that, and I made sure the bedding was hung out to dry.

  To have been betrayed by the men I lived with wounded me deeply, especially Huang. Everything he said was a lie. That I’d known Kazue Sat for a long time; that the three of us had relations. Those were nothing but bald-faced lies. He must have had his own reasons for trying to pin the blame on me. Please think about it, Detective Takahashi, Your Honor. I beg of you. I know I’ve said this already many, many times, but I never met Kazue Sat. That charge against me is false.

  When I met Yuriko Hirata, it spelled misfortune for us both. I heard from Detective Takahashi that Ms. Hirata had once been beautiful and had worked as a model. Detective Takahashi went on to say that “as she grew old and ugly she became a cheap streetwalker.” But I thought she was still beautiful.

  When I first saw her in Kabuki-ch I was attracted to her beauty and youthfulness. I didn’t care how late it was, I made a point of taking the route through Kabuki-ch on my way home from Futamomokko that night. When I saw that Miss Hirata was standing there in the rain waiting for me, I was filled with joy. She looked at me and smiled faintly. Then she said, “I’m about to freeze standing here waiting for you!”