Grotesque

by Natsuo Kirino

  She was wearing a black jacket over her sari. I was reluctant to be seen with her, her outfit was so bizarre, But when I saw how happy she looked I didn’t have the heart to say no.

  “There’s a coffee shop in the basement that should be okay. Ah, what a luxury this is—to be able to move about freely!” Mitsuru’s voice was buoyant, but she kept looking nervously over her shoulder. “I’m followed by detectives, you know.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “But what am I complaining about? You’re the one who’s really had it rough, aren’t you?” Mitsuru said sympathetically. She gave my arm a squeeze as we stepped into the elevator. Her hand was warm and damp and I found it annoying. I pulled away.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, Yuriko. It’s so awful—to have had something like that happen. I just can’t believe it. And Kazue! What a shock!”

  When the elevator reached the basement, I moved to get out and collided with Mitsuru, who had stepped ahead of me. She had stopped square in the doorway, too nervous to go farther.

  “I’m really sorry! I’m just not used to being out in public.”

  “When did they release you?”

  “Two months ago. I was in for six years,” she whispered.

  I looked at Mitsuru from behind. There wasn’t the slightest trace of the bright studious girl she had been in high school. Squirrel-like, sagacious Mitsuru! Now she was thin and flimsy and rough like a nail file. She looked like her mother—her mother who was so frank and so pathetic. Her mother who had betrayed my grandfather. I’d heard it was her mother who encouraged Mitsuru—and also her husband, who was a doctor—to join that religious group. But I wonder if that was true.

  “How is your husband?”

  “He’s still in. I have two sons, you know. They’re being brought up by my husband’s family, and I worry about their education.”

  Mitsuru sipped her coffee. A few drops dribbled off her lip and onto the front of her sari, staining it, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Still in?”

  “In confinement. I imagine he’ll serve the maximum sentence. It’s to be expected.” Mitsuru looked up at me, somewhat embarrassed. “But what about you? I just can’t believe what happened to Yuriko. And Kazue too. I can’t imagine that Kazue would do such a thing. She was such a hard worker. Maybe she just got tired of trying so hard.”

  Mitsuru pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the cloth bag she was carrying and lit one. She started to smoke, but she didn’t look used to it.

  “We’ve put on the years, you and I! I think the gap between your teeth has grown larger.”

  Mitsuru nodded in agreement. “You’ve aged too. Maliciousness just gushes from your face now.”

  The words triggered thoughts of the events in the courtroom that day. If anyone had a face from which maliciousness gushed forth, it was Zhang! That’s the face of a lying scoundrel if ever there was one. His ridiculous deposition was just varnished with lies. It’s clear that he killed a whole host of people in China to get their money. He raped his younger sister and killed her. And there’s no doubt he murdered both Yuriko and Kazue.

  “Tell me,” I asked Mitsuru. “A face that gushes with maliciousness: is that someone dogged by bad karma? I’m wondering what kind of karma I have, and I figured that if anyone could tell me, it’s you.”

  Mitsuru stubbed her cigarette out and frowned. She looked nervously around the room and finally spoke in a hushed voice.

  “Please don’t say such crazy things. I’ve quit the organization; I smoke now as proof. But you’ve misunderstood the doctrines of my former religion. Buying into all the garbage the mass media spews out just makes you despise people who are really sincere about what they believe.”

  “Are you showing me a face that gushes maliciousness, then?”

  “I’m sorry! I was wrong. I keep doing these things ever since I got out. I have no self-confidence, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to act. I mean, I’ve forgotten. I really need to get into some kind of rehab. I came here specifically because I thought I’d see you. I just used the Yuriko-and-Kazue trial as an excuse to see you again. Since I hate class reunions and gatherings of that kind, I figured it was the only chance I’d have.”

  Mitsuru raised her face as if she suddenly remembered something. “The letters I sent you from prison—did you get them?”

  “I got four: New Year’s cards and midsummer wishes.”

  “Sending New Year’s cards from a place like that was hard. They played the ‘Red and White Singing Contest’ on the radio. I’d listen to it, sitting zazen style, and cry. What the hell am I doing here, contemplating my navel? I’d wonder. But you never answered. Weren’t you pleased to learn that the straight-A student had ended up in prison? I’m sure you thought it appropriate. You must have thought it justified.” Her voice grew rough. “I made a royal mess of things, and I’m sure all the world rejoiced.”

  “Mitsuru, you’ve come to resemble your mother, haven’t you?”

  Whenever Mitsuru’s mother wanted to say something, she just blurted it out, letting the chips fall where they might. It always had an avalanche effect. Things would take on a momentum of their own; before she knew it, she’d said more than she should have and ended up where she hadn’t anticipated. The liar Zhang was the exact opposite, I thought, and once again I recalled his crafty face in the courtroom.

  “Hmm, have I?”

  “I remember your mother gave me a ride to school in her car once. It was on the same morning I learned that my mother had committed suicide. Your mother said she probably killed herself because she was menopausal.”

  “Right. I remember. How I wish I could go back in time! If only I could return to the days when I was able to live without knowing any of what I know now. If I could, I wouldn’t spend all my time studying like a maniac. I would fool around like the other girls and have fun dressing in the latest fashions. I would join the cheerleading squad or the golf team or the ice-skating club. And I would hang out with boys and go to parties. I just wish I’d lived the life of a normal happy teenager. You probably feel the same way, don’t you?”

  Hardly. I had never once thought of returning to the past. But if there were a time in the past that I would have wanted to return to, it would have been those peaceful days I spent with my grandfather when he was obsessed with his bonsai. However, then he got all tangled up in the lustful ripples that reverberated from Yuriko, went crazy over Mitsuru’s mother, and changed completely. So, no, there really was no time in the past I would want to visit. I suppose Mitsuru had completely forgotten the way we had convinced each other of our talents for survival. She began to irritate me, rather like the irritation I had felt earlier for Yuriko and her stupidity.

  Mitsuru peered at me anxiously. “What are you thinking about?”

  “About the past, of course. The distant past that you say you want to return to. I’d go back to the point in time when Yuriko was a flowering plant, and I was a naked-seed plant. Except, of course, Yuriko would be all dried up.”

  Mitsuru stared at me quizzically. I didn’t try to explain. When she saw I wasn’t going to continue, she blushed and turned away. There it was! There was the expression that was unique to her in high school.

  “Sorry, I know I’m acting strangely,” Mitsuru said, as she gripped her cloth bag. “It’s just that I can’t help feeling that everything I worked so hard for, everything I believed in, is now meaningless—and I can’t bear it. When I was in prison I did my utmost not to even think about it. But now that I’m out, it’s all coming back to haunt me, and I just panic. Of course, what we did was horrible, a huge mistake. I don’t know how I could have killed all those innocent people. But I’d been brainwashed. The leader of the sect could read what I was thinking and he controlled me that way. There was no way I could have escaped. I think it’s all over for me. I’m sure my husband will die in prison. I just cling to my children and wonder what to do. I’ve got to try my hardest
to ensure they’re brought up safely, since I’m all they have left. But I don’t think I can do it. I’ve got no confidence. Here I am: I studied my brains out, I got into Tokyo University Medical School, I became a doctor—yet I can never make up for those six years I spent in prison. And because of that, no one will ever hire me.”

  “What about Doctors Without Borders?” I asked, though I knew nothing about them myself.

  “Oh, so you don’t care because it’s not your problem,” Mitsuru mumbled darkly. “Talking about not one’s problem, everyone acts like they were shocked when they found out about Yuriko and Kazue. But I wasn’t. Those two were always defiant, swimming against the tide. Especially Kazue.”

  Mitsuru echoed what the female reporter had said earlier. No one seemed particularly interested in Yuriko. Kazue was the only one they treated as a celebrity. Mitsuru’s eyes were empty, completely devoid of the sparkling brilliance and bold independence they had once had.

  “Where are your children now?” I asked.

  Mitsuru had lit another cigarette. She squinted in the smoke. “They’re with my husband’s parents. The older boy is a sophomore in high school. The younger is preparing for his junior high entrance exams. I hear he wants to get into the Q School system, but there’s no way he’ll succeed. It’s not a question of his grades, he’ll never escape the curse of having us for parents. It’s as if he’s been branded.”

  Branded—that’s a good way to put it, don’t you think? It so perfectly suited my own situation and the way I had to go through life branded as the older sister of the monstrously beautiful Yuriko. I was seized with an intense desire to see Mitsuru’s children. I wondered what kind of faces they had. I was fascinated by the way genes are passed along, the way they are damaged and mutated.

  “I know you resent my mother,” Mitsuru said, breaking into my thoughts by saying something completely unexpected.

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Because she abandoned your grandfather. You probably don’t know, but your grandfather caused Mother to join the organization. She’s still in it too. She says she’ll hold her ground until the end. She’s looking after those members who are still practicing.”

  My grandfather would be shocked if he heard this. I knew Mitsuru’s mother supported her decision to join the organization; she’d joined too. But I could not for a moment entertain the idea that my grandfather was somehow responsible. Was it the enactment of some kind of karmic retribution?

  “My mother has said that disrupting your grandfather’s life like that was what she regretted most in life. And it wasn’t just your grandfather’s life, was it. She upset your life as well.”

  When I entered Q University, my grandfather decided to move in with Mitsuru’s mother, who bought a luxury apartment nearby. I went there once. I remember that the front door to the building locked automatically and you had to call up on the intercom to be let in. It was a new system at the time and my grandfather was terribly proud of it. But, ironically, it was because of that locking system that we knew he was growing senile. Each time he went out, he’d forget to take his key. Then he’d push the intercom button for the wrong apartment and stand there shouting, “It’s me! Let me in!”

  “It was on account of the love affair between my mother and your grandfather that both you and I were forced to live on our own. And then Mother came running back to live with me. She left everything in a shambles: my place, your place, the place she shared with your grandfather. She couldn’t forgive herself for what she’d done, so she decided to take up religious training. That’s what got her started.”

  “Was she able to forgive herself through religious training?”

  “No.” Mitsuru shook her head proudly. “That’s not it. She selected the path she took because she wanted to know more about the laws governing the human realm. She wanted to understand how human beings could possess such dark, selfish passions. At that time, my husband and I were tormented by questions of death. All humans die. But what happens to them after death? Is transmigration possible? As doctors, we could not avoid direct confrontation with death as an inevitable outcome—but now and then we encountered some inexplicable cases. That’s when my mother recommended that we meet the leader of the organization she had joined and talk with him. And that’s how we ended up joining too.”

  I was growing annoyed with this conversation and began avoiding Mitsuru’s gaze. It seems in the final analysis that people who get involved in religion are only after their own personal happiness. Am I wrong?

  “Well, my grandfather doesn’t care now,” I said. “He’s completely senile now and spends all his time in bed.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Very much so, though he’s now past ninety.”

  “Really, I’d just assumed he was dead.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s what your mother thinks too.”

  “We seem to be missing each other’s points.” Mitsuru hung her head so low I thought her neck would snap. “It’s probably because I haven’t properly returned to society yet.” A vacant gaze swept over her face. “In high school, I tried so hard to remain number one. Med school too. And I got everything I wanted. I was at the top of my department and was one of the best at the hospital. But gradually, things began to feel less clear than they had before. It makes sense when you think about it. A doctor is not evaluated by test scores. Of course, I know it’s important for doctors to save lives. But in the ear, nose, and throat specialty we rarely encounter cases that are life-threatening. Day after day I was faced with allergy-induced nasal inflammation. Only once did I see a patient who was in critical condition, owing to a tumor on the lower jaw. But that was it. That was the only time I felt my work was really worthwhile. So I lapsed into a kind of fog. That’s when I thought that if I underwent religious training I could bring my life to the next level.”

  I let out a long sigh. This was excruciating! You understand why, don’t you? I had loved Mitsuru. I had believed that we polished our respective talents—me my maliciousness and Mitsuru her brilliance—not because we wanted to be cool but because we needed them as weapons in order to survive the Q School for Young Women.

  Mitsuru glanced up at me uncertainly, “Did I say something to upset you?”

  I decided to give her some indication of the dark mood building inside me. If I didn’t, she’d lapse back into her “while I was in prison” routine.

  “When you were in college, were you able to keep your position at the top of the class?”

  Mitsuru silently lit her third cigarette. I waved the smoke away with my hand and waited for her to answer.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you the truth. I wasn’t first in the class, not by a long shot. I probably came in around the middle. No matter how hard I tried, how carefully I listened in class, or how many all-nighters I pulled studying, there were always others I could not beat. But what do you expect? I mean, the school admitted the brightest students from throughout the nation. To make it to the top you had to be naturally gifted, an absolute genius—otherwise you could study forever and it was still hopeless. After a few years I finally realized that far from being first, I’d be lucky if I ended up twentieth. It really gave me a shock. That’s not like me, I thought, and I began to suffer from an identity crisis. So do you know what I decided to do?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “I decided I would marry someone who really was a genius. That’s my husband. Takashi.”

  When she said his name was Takashi I immediately drew the association to Takashi Kashiwabara. But I remember seeing her husband’s photograph in the newspapers, and he didn’t look a thing like Takashi Kashiwabara. He was skinny, wore glasses, and looked like an overly studious scholar. No matter his genius, he was much too ugly for me to ever want to marry! From the point of view of physiognomy, his ears were pointy like a demon’s and his mouth was small. The middle
and lower phases of his face indicated weakness. His was a face that foretold great tragedy in the middle to late years of life. When I consider Takashi’s fate, I can only conclude that physiognomy is amazingly on target.

  “I’ve seen your husband’s face.”

  “Right. He’s famous.”

  “And so are you.”

  Mitsuru flushed red—whether because of my sarcasm or a hot flash, I couldn’t tell. As a cult member, Mitsuru had been involved in a number of cases involving the kidnapping of believers. If these so-called believers tried to escape, Mitsuru and the others would lock them in a room, force them to take drugs, and then begin the initiation. If they weren’t careful, the victims would overdose and die.

  Still, those deaths were nothing compared to the time Mitsuru’s husband dropped poison gas from a Cessna airplane on a number of farmers and their families. The leader of their religious organization suffered from some kind of persecution complex, which was triggered when local farmers staged protests against the establishment of his religious headquarters near their farmlands, so he ordered Mitsuru’s husband to drop mustard gas on their fields. At the time, as luck would have it, a group of elementary students were visiting the farms for a little hands-on agriculture study, and they were caught up in the gas. Fifteen people died.

  Mitsuru tried to change the subject.

  “Do you know about osmotic pressure? I thought, if I married a brilliant man, that some of his genius would brush off on me.”

  I noticed that as she began to talk, her body started to cave in on itself, like a sail that loses the wind. Her thin body grew all the flatter. I could see the veins crawling over the fingers clutching the cigarette. I was amazed by how empty-headed Mitsuru had become.

  “By that time, my mother had separated from your grandfather. She joined the organization, saying she wanted to eliminate her illusions. By illusions she meant her selfish passions.”