The Maid

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

  Will I be forced to play bit parts from now on?

  She shuddered and denied it all vehemently.

  If that’s the case, I’m better off dead.

  Yoko seemed quite incapable of getting to sleep. Which meant that Nanase couldn’t sleep either, for she was unable to fasten her latch and cut off Yoko’s mind. The intense pressure this consciousness was exerting on her would not allow her to ignore it.

  The next morning, two hours after Hisao left for work, Yoko got up.

  “Could you get me a cup of coffee?”

  When Nanase peered into Yoko’s mind from across the kitchen table, she learnt that Yoko had undergone another violent shock that morning on discovering how utterly worn and aged she looked in the mirror. Her face, haggard from lack of sleep, was unmistakably that of a pathetic woman desperately clinging to her youth. Her thirty-eight years, typified by tired skin and flabby cheeks, could no longer be denied.

  It occurred to Nanase that Hisao was the one who had driven Yoko into this awful state. Up until now, Yoko had used her powerful ego and quick brain to block out her age. Hisao was wrong to have reminded her of it.

  And yet there was also a more sensible voice inside Nanase saying that Hisao was in the right. Nanase for some reason did not want to hear it – choosing to defend Yoko’s devotion to youth, even if her actions were immoral, simply because of the empathy she felt towards another woman. What was wrong with trying to keep a hold on youth? Wasn’t it human to fear death?

  Suddenly Nanase noticed that Yoko was staring into her face with a strange gleam in her eyes. Yoko seemed to be devouring Nanase’s creamy skin glistening in the morning sun, while in her thoughts she was ripping the skin off with her sharp nails and attaching it to her own face.

  I want her skin. I want her youth. I want her inexperience, her vulnerability. I want her healthy stupidity.

  While Yoko’s judgement of her as inexperienced and stupid was obviously off the mark, Nanase found Yoko’s weird fantasy so frightening that she was having trouble keeping calm.

  Luckily, Yoko’s thoughts soon moved to Osamu.

  I wonder if he really was avoiding me? Why don’t I call him? He’s probably home now.

  Nanase wanted to yell at her to stop. She couldn’t stand to watch Yoko telephone the young boy who had rejected her and try to regain his love by chiding him coquettishly. But Yoko went to the living room, picked up the receiver and started dialling. Nanase was relieved to find in Yoko’s thoughts not the least desire to play the coquette. The problem was how Osamu would react. Yoko was going to show him who was boss.

  Osamu picked up the phone right away. She could hear his voice through Yoko’s consciousness.

  “Osamu? It’s me.” Yoko spoke calmly.

  “Oh…” He was at a loss for an answer. He probably never dreamt that she would call. He too must have been aware of Yoko’s pride.

  “You didn’t show up yesterday,” said Yoko, her tone harsh.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized immediately. He seemed nervous. “I was thinking of calling you, but I knew I shouldn’t call you at home and—”

  “You can give me your excuses later,” said Yoko flatly. “At one o’clock I want you to come to where we arranged to meet yesterday.”

  She wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so after some hesitation, he agreed. He was clearly afraid of her.

  What’s the point of going out with such a fraidy cat, thought Nanase, and at that very moment Yoko was thinking the same thing. Yoko was meeting him for her own sake, not for that of their relationship. They’ll end up hurting each other, predicted Nanase uneasily. Yoko seemed to be in an even worse state than the night before, and Nanase was afraid – both for Yoko and for herself.

  As Yoko got ready to leave, she thought over how best to approach Osamu so she could get at his true feelings. Slightly past noon, ignoring Hisao’s order, she drove off in her sports car without a word to Nanase about when she’d be back or what chores to do. Yoko was hardly the type to put up with jolting suburban trains or rude taxi drivers.

  As she cleaned the kitchen, Nanase pursued Yoko’s consciousness. Once Yoko entered the highway, she started picking up speed – obviously in reaction to Hisao’s criticisms.

  I’m not going to take this lying down. I’m not the kind of person who will give up driving a car and wearing ready-made clothes because they’re supposedly not suitable for me.

  She’d better be careful, thought Nanase, who could only clench her fists, petrified. Yoko was speeding at 170 kilometres per hour in the overtaking lane. True, there were few cars on the road, but only once before, a number of years ago, had she gone so fast. Nanase had a mental picture of Yoko’s field of vision and the speed was making her head spin. A distant trailer in the left lane was getting closer moment by moment.

  When there were only ten metres between her and the trailer, it suddenly veered into the overtaking lane at eighty kilometres per hour to pass a small automobile. Yoko hadn’t seen the automobile. Nanase let out a cry.

  At once Yoko could see the back of the trailer looming larger.

  All right.

  Yoko bit her lips.

  Since middle-aged drivers never have accidents speeding… I don’t care if I die.

  For one moment Yoko’s field of vision went pitch black, then a panorama unfolded in her consciousness.

  Five seconds later her consciousness began to diffuse. At the far side of the widening crack lay death.

  Nanase screamed. This was the first time she had seen death. Death was the colour of nothingness. The colour of nothingness was neither black nor even the colour of empty space, but, quite simply, the colour of nothingness. It was a colour so frightening that Nanase feared it might drive her insane. All alone in the house, she stood by the kitchen table, fists clenched and flinging her arms about violently, as if to expel a nightmare before her eyes. And all the while she kept on screaming hysterically.

  After Yoko’s death, during her funeral and until Nanase left the Kawahara home, Hisao tried to convince himself that he was not responsible for her death. By trying to lay the blame on something other than himself, his complicated mental mechanism was suppressing and distorting a guilt that was dangerously close to surfacing in his consciousness.

  Yoko was the victim of an aberrant cult of youth. In this modern era, which only recognizes products, amusements and culture for the young, middle-aged values have been debased. The middle-aged are made to feel superfluous and the young are resentful of getting older. The step after youth worship is the search for rejuvenation; the middle-aged are all slaves of this quest for youth. They detest conventions and clothing suited to their age, and insist on copying the young styles. Of course, they only end up making fools of themselves. Yoko was wrong. Turning middle-aged is not a banishment from youth; it’s a mature human being’s liberation from the insanities of youth. However, caught up in this era of youth worship, she was unable to perceive this. Even though her car, a product of this youth-idolizing age, has capacities too advanced for a middle-aged person, she was under the delusion that she had perfect control of it. She was killed by our modern age – this crazy age where the youth cult is running rampant. There’s no doubt about it. No doubt about it. Because, you see, she too was taken in by these modern advertisements spouting their ridiculous elixirs for rejuvenation, and with an unswerving belief that as long as she had the desire she could maintain her youth for ever, she never even dreamt that she would be middle-aged. It was this frantic youth-centred age that made her think this way. There’s no doubt about it. She was killed by our crazy modern society. Absolutely. Because, you see…

  Because…

  Because…

  4

  The Peach

  The Kiryus lived in a neighbourhood that dated back before the war. It had probably been a fashionable area once, if the ornate carvings on the bay windows and balconies that could be glimpsed beyond hedges and lush gardens were anything to go by. But no
w most of the houses were run down, with the vaguely melancholic air of having been left behind by the times. For Nanase, who was accustomed to bright, new residential neighbourhoods, these houses, hidden beneath towering trees that had grown unchecked, seemed almost shabby.

  The Kiryus’ home was badly in need of repair. If they could afford a live-in maid, the family was by no means poor; yet they showed no interest in making any repairs. The house, both inside and out, was going to seed. The walls and ceilings were black with dirt, the wooden panelling was loose in places, all of the rooms were dark. The small maid’s room that Nanase had been provided with did not even have a window, and the grimy walls and ceiling only made it that much worse. Even for Nanase, who was used to poorly lit rooms, the darkness was almost unbearable.

  “This house is so run down,” the members of the family would sometimes mutter, looking around as if suddenly remembering the fact. But no one ever suggested making repairs or calling in a carpenter. Obviously no one wanted the responsibility.

  The head of the Kiryu household was fifty-seven-year-old Katsumi, who had retired two years earlier. Up until then his company, which manufactured steel pipes, had had a mandatory retirement age of sixty; then, like a bolt out of the blue, the retirement age was lowered to fifty-five. Katsumi was completely caught off guard by his forced early retirement, and he had still not got over the shock. In fact, it seemed to Nanase that his absent-mindedness, perhaps brought on by his retirement, was getting steadily worse.

  Nanase had been working at the Kiryus’ for only two months, but from reading Katsumi’s mind, she knew that the goals he had carefully made for his retirement, along with the confidence that he could live out his remaining years at his own pace, had been cruelly smashed. She sensed the terrible emptiness brought on by his idle existence.

  Katsumi was well aware that his family shunned him. At first they were attentive to his needs; now they thought nothing of treating him as so much excess baggage, with his loafing around the house all day with nothing to do. Even his wife, Teruko, found him a nuisance.

  “Father’s awful – he spies on us in our bedroom,” Ayako, the daughter-in-law, told Nanase. As far as Nanase could tell from reading Ayako’s mind, however, Ayako was really complaining about the lewd glances Katsumi gave her.

  Ryuichi, Katsumi’s eldest son, had just turned thirty and had already been promoted to section chief in charge of raw materials at a shipbuilding company. Of course, Ayako’s desire to brag about her husband made her want to deprecate Katsumi all the more. And in fact, the image of Katsumi in Ayako’s mind was that of a failure.

  “Hey, could you get me some tea?” Katsumi would wander into the kitchen any number of times a day, sit down across from Nanase at the table and stare at her as she worked. This was probably the look he had given his daughter-in-law before Nanase had moved in, and it was so offensive that Ayako had cajoled Ryuichi into hiring a maid.

  Katsumi’s behaviour and – as Ayako pictured them in her thoughts – his lewd stares were even more disturbing to Nanase because she could see so clearly the struggle and repression in his consciousness. Still, it was a relief that whenever she was with Ayako, Katsumi’s glances would stray in the daughter-in-law’s direction.

  At dinner time, Teruko, always in bed with some illness, would emerge from a back room, and the whole family would assemble in the dining room. There were six in all – Katsumi and his wife, Teruko; their elder son, Ryuichi, and his wife, Ayako; their younger son, Tadaji, a high-school senior; and their four-year-old grandson, Akira. They usually watched television, but occasionally someone would start a conversation. Then invariably they would end up criticizing, in a roundabout fashion, the idle ways of the head of the household, giving irresponsible – and hardly considerate – suggestions on how to reform him.

  “You went into my room today, didn’t you, Father?” Tadaji asked one evening, not bothering to disguise the accusation. A medicine commercial flashed onto the TV screen.

  Tadaji had long suspected that when he wasn’t home, his father would sneak into his room and go through his drawers and letters. But since he had no evidence, Tadaji had kept quiet. Now he just had to say something. It was obvious that his father had read a letter from a girl.

  Horny bastard. Nothing better to do than nose around your son’s room.

  Tadaji despised his father for being so incompetent as to lose his job at the age of fifty-five. To him, this pot-bellied, slimy lecher who happened to be his father looked more like some out-of-work bum than a retired gentleman.

  “Uh-huh.” Judging from Tadaji’s tone, Katsumi imagined that his son had proof for his accusation, so he didn’t try to deny it. “I was looking for, uh, an interesting book to read.”

  What’s so bad about a father going into his son’s room? You’re only in high school, smart-arse kid!

  Even if Katsumi did feel a bit guilty for having read the letter from the girl, he was disgusted at being in so weak a position that he had to justify himself to his seventeen-year-old son.

  Damn. Who’s the head of this household anyway?

  In these instances, Nanase would momentarily forget the dislike she felt towards Katsumi during the day and feel sorry for him. Since she herself was constantly reading minds, Katsumi’s snooping around people’s rooms seemed an innocent enough way to relieve his boredom.

  After debating whether or not to defend Katsumi, Teruko decided to keep quiet. Tadaji was so stubborn that anything she might say in her husband’s defence would only provoke the child even more. The end result would be the loss of Katsumi’s parental authority. Once that happened, Ryuichi and, worse, his wife might start throwing their weight around. This was the one thing Teruko would not be able to put up with.

  Of course, for Teruko, Katsumi had lost his authority as a husband a long time ago. For a number of years she had used illness as an excuse to deny him marital pleasures. Katsumi, at fifty-seven, was two years younger than her and still maintained the vigour of a carnivorous beast. Even now he would pursue her whenever he could. But Teruko, who had convinced herself that she had a body like a prune, could only feel an intense physical loathing towards him.

  Recently Teruko had aged suddenly, her hair having turned grey. Her disgust for the way Katsumi clung to his youth, symbolized by his jet-black hair, made her more defiant. Oddly enough, she was trying to protect herself by ridiculing her husband for acting like a kid carried away with his sex drive. As Nanase saw it, these attempts at convincing herself of the benefits of turning old were really ways to block out her fear of death. Surely this pretence at sickliness was an unconscious escape into disease.

  “You have too much time on your hands, Dad,” said Tadaji sarcastically, though he had given up pursuing the matter of the letter. He knew that if he pressed his father too much, Teruko, in her role as mother, and Ryuichi, in his role as elder brother, would have to intervene on Katsumi’s behalf.

  Why don’t you get another job? You were lording it over everyone as section chief all those years so you can’t stomach the thought of starting as an underling at a new company. You don’t want to go where you can’t act high and mighty, so you lord it over us at home. Creep!

  Tadaji’s feelings towards his father resembled Ryuichi’s. Ryuichi, however, realized that he hated Katsumi because they were so much alike. It depressed him to think that one day he might end up like his father; of course, he was also confident it would never happen to him. Even if he were forced to retire, he was convinced that he’d be able to find some reason to go on living.

  What Ryuichi hadn’t considered, though, was how he would go about finding this reason or what reason it might be. Ryuichi was keenly aware that a lowering of the retirement age was the general trend, and this was a constant worry to him. It was because he couldn’t bear to see his father in his present state that he ridiculed him for being unable to do anything about it.

  “Father, I’ve heard about a computer that in ten minutes can pick out the
work best suited for you. Why don’t you give it a try?” Ryuichi suggested casually. As he was, at least on the surface, softening Tadaji’s attack, he was able to speak his mind.

  I’m sure you’ll find fault with the idea for one reason or another. Why don’t you just go out and buy a woman? The nerve, giving my wife obscene looks. You old lecher! With your shiny, greasy forehead! In spite of your pent-up energy, all you can do is laze around. If you were really over the hill, I wouldn’t care about looking after you.

  Nanase, who had explored the psychologies of various families she had worked for, knew that hatred among close relations was nothing unusual. Still, Ryuichi’s denunciation of his father, just because Ryuichi realized he would be in the same predicament himself one day, was more than she could take.

  Katsumi, pretending to be watching a drama on TV, did not answer Ryuichi. But in his mind he was cursing his son’s irresponsible proposition made under the guise of kindness.

  Find a job from a machine? What a way to speak to your father. Treating me like a nuisance. If I’m so much in the way, why don’t you all move out? You think you’re so smart, but you don’t have enough money to buy your own house! You’re just living off your parents. I know you have your eyes on the money I got when I retired. You think I’d give any of it to you? You’ve got to be kidding. I’ll spend it all. On whatever I feel like.

  But Katsumi had so much money that he knew he could never spend it all, even if he found some expensive hobby. What could he do anyway? And even if he thought of something, he knew he wouldn’t enjoy it.

  As Nanase saw it, Katsumi’s biggest problem was that he didn’t know how to have a good time. Someone who knew how to enjoy himself would probably come up with a hobby that not only wouldn’t cost any money, but might even turn a profit; this in itself could give him a reason to go on living.

  But from the time Katsumi had entered his company up until the present – in other words, for the greater part of his life – he had never wanted to relax. He had lived only for his work, and since he thought of amusement as a kind of vice, he even considered it dangerous. So for him to lose his job was like being expelled from the Garden of Eden.