Toddler Hunting

by Taeko Kono

  She wondered how Sasaki would react if she told him she wanted a baby. Most likely, he’d pick a fight, storm off, and never return.

  Akiko’s period was always regular — except for once, when she’d made Sasaki whip her so violently that she couldn’t stand up for two days and it came two weeks late. But there was hardly a month when it didn’t arrive on time, the bright red blood floating in the white porcelain bowl before being whirled away with the water. When she’d been younger, Akiko had been amazed by her body — by its strangeness. Every month, over and over, it made a little bed inside for a baby, unaware that none would be born, and then took it apart again. And it had seemed to her a grave matter that not one person on this earth was created yet out of her own blood.

  But she would always find herself wondering how, after giving birth to the baby, she could get someone else to take care of it — and whether there wasn’t some way she could reserve the right to only occasionally oversee its care. She began to greatly envy men, who could avoid parental tasks so easily. All this surely proved how poorly she was endowed with natural maternal urges.

  And then, two or three years ago, there had been her bout of pulmonary TB. Her case had been serious, and though her recovery had been surprisingly rapid, she had been told by her doctors that she should never try to have a child — she would never survive. And by now, even had they told her she could have a baby, Akiko no longer wished for one. Aside from the question of how she would arrange it, her physical and emotional stamina had been quite worn down by the disease. And she was so impatient — the thought of being tied down by such a long commitment was insufferable. This, she thought, was probably what kept her in the relationship with Sasaki.

  For all these reasons, she had become a woman for whom maternal love was a totally alien emotion — a woman even less able to think of bringing up children. Akiko now felt at ease knowing that having a baby was out of the question for her body — when this fact came to mind, she felt an emotion close to joy.

  It was already nine o’clock. She needed to eat, but she stayed sprawled out on the floor. She had recovered her equanimity. The frustration she’d felt began to change into a different sort of excitement. Often, after surges of emotion, a strange fantasy world would descend and take her in its sway. She chose to stay on the floor in the hope of this happening, and already there were signs of it starting.

  As the dream world spread out about her, Akiko would plunge herself into it, her pulse beating faster and faster and her skin all moist, and she would reach ecstasy, losing all ­self-control.

  Two figures always appeared in this strange world: a little boy of seven or eight, and a man in his thirties. The details of their personalities and activities varied slightly each time, but the age gap remained constant, as did their relationship as father and child. Their faces were out of focus, but it was important for Akiko to be able to believe that the child, at least, was very very sweet.

  The man would be thrashing the child, and scolding him in so gentle a tone that it was harrowing. The beating would start out as the kind any father might give his son, but gradually it would reach a level of horrifying atrocity. At the very climax of the scene, however, the thought of the impossibility of such things actually happening in the real world would surface in her mind, and Akiko would return abruptly to herself. Her face would be flushed, but she’d know that she was back in reality.

  — You really disappoint me, the father starts. I’m going to have to teach you a lesson.

  A crash as the father whacks the child across the face, almost knocking his head off. The child staggers under the blow, and then gets back on his feet straightaway, trying to bear the pain. But he is unable to resist touching his cheek furtively.

  — Hasn’t Daddy warned you time and again not to do that? I suppose it takes more than one lesson to make you understand.

  The father issues an order to someone, and an alligator-skin belt is placed in front of him.

  — Take off your clothes.

  The child does as he is told, and the father begins whipping his buttocks with the belt.

  — How about using our other implement? The voice is a woman’s. The belt is dropped and he picks up a cane.

  More punishment. With every lash of the cane, there are shrieks and agonized cries. The child is sent sprawling forward, sometimes flat on his face, but he struggles to get up each time, ready to receive the next stroke, a course of action he carries out without being told.

  — The bleeding seems to have begun. The woman’s voice again. There it is, the blood, streaming down in a line over the child’s buttocks, over his thighs. The blood is smeared over the surface of his flesh by yet more thrashes of the cane.

  Another lash from the father. More blood spurts out. Now, two lines of blood, as if racing each other, trickle steadily down. But suddenly the flow comes to a halt: looking closely, one sees the blood has dried. The scene is, after all, taking place in the full heat of a blazing summer sun.

  — Hit me on my back, Father, the child begs.

  — I was leaving that till last. There’s no hurry.

  The father sets down the cane, and taking the child over to a corrugated metal shack, grabs him by the shoulders and forces him against the scorching metal. The child tries to escape, wriggling around and desperately pushing himself away, but to no avail. He is pinned by the heavy body of the father, pressed flat against the searing hot side. There follows the hiss of roasting flesh.

  The father pulls the child from the shack. The child totters, about to faint, but the father hauls him up. Then he turns the child around so that the woman can get a good look at the burnt, flayed back––the dark red-colored stripes left by the ridges of hot metal.

  There is more to come, but now the child crumples to the ground when told to stand. More scolding. The father ties the child’s hands together and suspends him from the branch of the tree.

  — What else should I see to? the father asks.

  — You haven’t touched his stomach. The woman’s voice again, insinuating. The child gets a few lashes on his belly, and suddenly, his stomach splits open. Intestines, an exquisitely colored rope of violet, slither out.

  The woman gives the order: the father cuts the cord around the child’s hands. The child drops down from the branch to the ground. Now the father pulls the purple rope until it is tight and jerks the child’s body about as if trying to get a kite to rise into the air. The little body at the end of the purple rope is slammed against the corrugated metal shack repeatedly. Every twitch on the rope brings forth pitiful, horrifying screams.

  Akiko saw Sasaki when she went into work at the factory. As they walked down the corridor, he asked, “Feeling better?”

  “Doesn’t it look like it?”

  “You gave me a scare.”

  “Serves you right — sending telegrams in the middle of the night.”

  Akiko had spent the previous night with Sasaki, but she hadn’t mentioned the telegram.

  “But it was delivered the next morning, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s what bothers me. What were you doing that you got to the post office so late?”

  “Oh, I went to the night baseball game, and . . .”

  They were in front of the Accounting Department — Akiko had come in to collect her wages. She disappeared behind the door, leaving him in ­midsentence.

  Back at home, Akiko started to clear up. That morning in her hurry to get to work she had left her room just as it was. A few pearls had rolled here and there on the floor.

  The night before, Akiko had wanted to add a little variety to their usual routine, and she’d looked round frantically for something to help. Finally, she hit upon a pearl necklace.

  “They’re not real,” she’d said, handing them to him.

  “Hmm. Hey, not bad.” Sasaki dangled the necklace from hi
s fingertips to tantalize her.

  Then, gripping it tightly, he circled around her. Akiko was already so aroused she felt as if every nerve in her body was concentrated in the flesh of her back. When he brought the beads down on her skin, however, the sting and the smart cracking were over as soon as they started. The thread of the necklace snapped and with a dull patter pearls scattered across the floor. Sasaki and Akiko laughed, a little uncertainly.

  Two strands of thread, a few pearls still clinging to them, hung from Sasaki’s fist. Putting them in the lid of a ­mosquito-coil box, he began crawling around on his hands and knees, hunting up the others. Akiko watched him with growing vexation: “Just leave them, can’t you!” Hearing her own tone of voice, she was disappointed to realize that the mood had left her.

  But the next moment, Sasaki caught sight of a vinyl ­washrope hanging in a corner, the type with plastic knobs and metal hooks at either end. As he reached for it and started doubling it up, Akiko was already begging him to use the jagged metal hooks on her — they’d make a clicking sound.

  It depended on what they used, but they both enjoyed the sound things made whipped against her skin. The more excited the noises made them, the more they would have to suppress their cries. That night, however, Sasaki had been especially resourceful with that length of rope, and Akiko’s screams smothered out the thrashing sound. At first they hadn’t realized somebody was knocking on the door.

  “What’s that?” Sasaki froze in ­midstroke, and by an unfortunate coincidence, a ­fire-engine siren started wailing through the neighborhood. Akiko’s heart gave a leap.

  Pulling a shirt over his shoulders, Sasaki put his face round the door.

  “I was a little worried.” It was the voice of the old superintendent with rimless ­eyeglasses. “I don’t want them to have to carry you out of there dead.”

  The other tenants of the building were familiar with the ­goings-on in this room. That night, however, they must have gone a little too far.

  “Sorry. We didn’t mean to worry you.”

  “In any case, keep it down, won’t you? Remember there are other people living in this building.”

  “Sorry. Really.”

  Listening to their voices, Akiko suddenly felt sick. For a moment, she thought she would vomit. She lay down, but already everything before her eyes was black.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The window . . . ,” Akiko said, pushing back the curtain billowing out over her face like a sail in the breeze. “I’m very cold.”

  The shock thinking that a fire had started: had that sent the blood in her already racing heart into turmoil? A moment before, her body had been a mass of ­red-hot iron filings leaping around in space. Now she was aware of it cooling down rapidly. She didn’t seem to have lost consciousness, though — she could hear Sasaki’s voice, at some distance, and herself responding. Or at least, so she had thought. Afterwards, he told her that there had been thirty minutes or so when she’d had no reaction to anything he said, and her pulse had grown steadily weaker.

  Akiko brought a hand to her brow and her fingers were stiff with cold. Sasaki released her other wrist, and stood up.

  “This is bad.” There was the sound of his belt being buckled.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get a doctor.”

  “I’m all right,” Akiko said, her eyes closed, and she was beginning to feel a little better. A damp ­hand towel had been pushed down between her breasts, she realized, and she was covered by a blanket and quilt.

  “I really thought they would have to carry a corpse out of here!” Sasaki said the next morning, recounting the scene to her. “I want you to prepare a testimonial.”

  “What for?”

  “Just so there’s something about our sexual habits maybe having certain consequences, and if I do end up killing you, to prove it was an accident.”

  “All right, don’t worry. I’ll do it.”

  It was three in the afternoon when Akiko set out for the neighborhood public bath. Only seven or eight women were there: a new mother with her baby, some old women with nothing better to do, and young women bathing before going off to work in the evening.

  For some reason, perhaps having to do with the design of the bathhouse, clients tended to cluster around the middle of the changing room, while in the bathroom itself they took up places along the outer wall — hardly anyone could be seen elsewhere. Akiko had purposely chosen a time when the place would be empty, and making sure to conceal her cuts with her ­wash towel, she picked her way over the tiles, which were covered with dry grains of scrubbing detergent, to an area where there was nobody at all. At the far end of the room, the water in the bath was always very hot, so hot that, especially when the temperature had just been stoked, nobody dared enter it for a while. There, in the corner, in front of the faucets, Akiko would take up her position. When she was ready to soak her body in the hot water, she would immerse herself first in a tub that was adjacent, where a trickle of cold water flowed in.

  As she soaked, Akiko would keep an eye on the ­changing room, which she could keep in sight because the separating doors had been drawn back. Were there any cute little boys with their mothers? Wasn’t even one going to come over and join her?

  If she did see a little boy, darkly tanned from the knees down, playing by the edge of the bath with a little boat or a soapbox lid, Akiko couldn’t resist giving him one of her special winks. The child never failed to respond. He would float his boat her way on a reconnaissance trip, and she would then make waves, sending it back on a storm, happy to go on playing in the bath forever—rescuing the boat if it sank, and starting up a conversation. Somewhere the mother would be calling her son, but he wouldn’t go. Finally, the mother would come and pull him away. One arm gripped by his mother, the other clasping the boat to his chest, the little boy would turn to look back for an instant at Akiko. Then he would head off, his plump little feet smacking the wet tiles. Akiko would get out of the water, a melancholy smile on her lips.

  Today, as a result of last night’s wild abandon — closer in fact to an act of ­self-annihilation — Akiko longed more than ever for a little boy to appear. It was a strange attachment that she had to little boys, one which she preferred to keep Sasaki in the dark about.

  The bathing area was filling up, but it didn’t look as if Akiko’s wish would be granted today. Wanting to escape before it got too crowded, she left after a quick scrub without getting into the tub at all.

  Akiko walked home, keeping to the shady side of the street. Then, just as she entered an alley, turning the corner by the vegetable shop, she encountered a little boy.

  He was about three years old, a toddler she hadn’t seen before. Dressed in a grubby athletic jersey and ­putty-colored pants, he was standing by a stack of cartons and baskets, struggling with a chunk of watermelon.

  Akiko got a little closer.

  “Good?” she asked, as an opening gambit.

  The child nodded without raising his eyes. Wanting a little more of a reaction, she tried again: “Is that good?”

  “It’s good.” He gave a clear answer this time.

  Pointing the little forefinger of his right hand like a pistol, he was using it to dig out the seeds. But his finger was poking around a little too eagerly, so all the seeds seemed to dive back deeper inside their holes. It was only a small chunk of watermelon, cut from a larger slice, but the chunk appeared quite unwieldy, his arms were so stubby and his fists so small.

  The child was totally absorbed, concentrating on digging out one particular seed. Refusing to go on to others nearer the surface, he held the chunk in one hand, turning it this way and that, vainly trying with his other to hook out that one recalcitrant seed.

  Akiko watched as he plunged his finger into the watermelon flesh. The juice spurted out, running down his fingers and all over his wrist, ch
anging to the color of vinegar as it mixed with the sweat and grime collected there from the various escapades of his day.

  His concentration momentarily broken, the boy looked up and took in Akiko’s presence.

  “Difficult, isn’t it?” she said.

  The child grunted.

  Akiko knelt, and put her bath bag on her knee.

  “Let Auntie see.” She pulled his fingers out of the watermelon. She had wanted to keep the boy’s hands in her own, holding the chunk with him, but he gave the fruit up to her, and wiped his dripping fingers on the seat of his pants.

  The seed was lodged at the very end of a deep hole.

  “Do you want Auntie to get it out?”

  The child grunted again, rubbing his fist like a harmonica against his lips. Akiko poked with her little finger, and the seed slipped out.

  “Good at it, aren’t I?”

  “You’re a ­grown-up.”

  “Well then, leave it to me,” Akiko laughed, keeping the fruit. She proceeded to pick out every seed in the chunk (now mauled to an oozing red mass), including the ones that poked their heads out of the loose wet pulp.

  “Now,” she said, holding it out to him, “Take a bite.”

  Using both hands, the child brought the watermelon to his mouth, and with each bite, juice gushed over his small ­soft-looking upper lip. While he worked on swallowing a mouthful, he would pull the chunk of fruit down with a sharp jerk, and hold it in front of him. Two bright red streaks were pointing up like flames from either side of his mouth.

  “Hey,” Akiko said, unable to resist. “Won’t you give me some of that?”

  In silence, the child offered up the watermelon. Akiko took hold of it with her hands over his, pulling the boy up to her. She sank her teeth into the fruit, and the mouthful of watermelon was so pulpy and warm, it was like biting into live flesh.

  “Good?” the child asked.

  Akiko nodded gravely, squeezing as much flavor as she could out of the mouthful of fruit, savoring the tang of the child’s sweat, the grime from his fingers, even his saliva, before letting it slide slowly down her throat.