She had promised to nude model for him back when she had gone to Ice Storm for the first time with Takumi.
“Sure. But choose somewhere warm, okay?”
“I want to take photos of goosebumps, Kako’s goosebumps.”
He grasped some fried chicken with his chopsticks and tossed the pebbled flesh into his mouth.
Takumi’s apartment was closer, so after leaving the pub they pressed their drifting bodies together as they walked along beside the tracks. Takumi was humming Glay’s new song. Kanako hummed and harmonized with him. Now that it was October, it was cold wearing only short sleeves. As she rubbed at the goosebumps on her arms, Takumi lightly wrapped his arm around her.
She might one day start a family with this person. She had the feeling for the first time a year into dating him.
If so, when would she tell him everything? Miho Tsuzuki said that she sifted people she got close to by telling them her background of being “a death-row convict’s daughter.” The one who had remained after learning everything had been Akira Nakagaki. That was why Miho Tsuzuki had become his wife.
Following that example, would Kanako know whether she could form a union with Takumi when she revealed her past and saw how he reacted? Even if she was the daughter of the victim and not the murderer, marriage was still a matter between families. Takumi was the heir to a brewery in Niigata, and perhaps his parents would object to him marrying a girl with such a complicated background.
She chastised herself that she was thinking too far ahead.
“We’ll just go to bed tonight,” she said.
“Come on.”
He sounded childishly whiny. What a cute guy, Kanako thought. It had been three days since Miho Tsuzuki had confessed her background to Kanako. She had called Takumi with her cell phone from in front of Shinbashi station, and he had warmed her body, which had been chilled from the evening rain. Takumi’s assiduous caresses had lent heat to her, except for her black core. After three days of no sex, apparently twenty-one-year-old males were ready to explode.
As soon as they entered Takumi’s room, he took off her clothes, and they took a shower together.
“I can’t, I can’t hold back, it’s fine if we do it here, right?”
She put both hands on the edges of the tub and he entered her from behind. Perhaps because they were drunk, her walls, wrapping around Takumi, seemed more sensitive than usual. This position reminded her of copulating animals and was only a step away from sexual abuse, the rational part of Kanako’s mind thought as it observed herself objectively.
Miho Tsuzuki probably also got loved in this manner.
“Be careful. Make sure to pull out.”
Even as she moaned, they couldn’t shirk contraception.
After that came exhaustion. Their buzz surged back, and after drying and clothing themselves top and bottom with sportswear, they collapsed onto the single bed together.
Kanako was wrapped in heavy drowsiness.
“…Hey, it’s ringing.”
She wondered how much time had passed. She was sound asleep when Takumi shook her awake. A muffled electronic sound was ringing through the room. It was Kanako’s cell phone.
“Who?” she asked.
“How should I know? You want me to take the call or what?”
She left the warmth of the blankets and extracted her tote bag from beneath the mess of clothes thrown over it. She looked at the screen. The caller name was Miho Tsuzuki.
Tension shook off any lingering drowsiness. She hit the receive button.
“…Hello?”
Silence. She wondered if their connection was bad.
“Hello?”
She looked at the face of the alarm clock. It was three in the morning. What did the girl want at such an hour? For Miho, though, it may have been the perfect time, after getting back from work and before going to sleep.
“It’s Miho, right? Can you hear me?”
There was breathing that sounded like air being dragged in. It eventually formed into a voice.
“…Help me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Please help.”
“Hey, what happened?”
“What’s going on?” asked Takumi, turning on the bedside lamp.
“…It hurts so bad.” Miho sobbed, in pain. She had probably been beaten by her husband. It only took a second for Kanako to reach that conclusion.
“Where are you right now? Your room? Are you at home?”
“Help me, it hurts,” Miho hiccuped the words like some sniffling kid.
“I’m coming right away.”
Kanako cut the call and quickly stripped off her jersey and changed.
“It seems like my friend got hurt. I’m off.”
“Who the hell is Miho?”
“She’s a friend back from high school,” she lied on the spot.
“Where is she?”
“Gotanda.”
“Want me to take you? You won’t be able to catch a taxi from here.”
She decided to take him up on his offer. The photography club’s station wagon was parked in the apartment’s lot.
“At this time of night, it should only take around fifteen minutes. Around where in Gotanda?”
“It’d be great if you could drop me off near the station.”
She didn’t want Takumi getting too close to where Miho lived.
She got in on the passenger’s side of the station wagon, and they left the parking lot. Takumi sat in the driver’s seat with only a jacket thrown over his pajamas.
“So you have friends like that too, huh, Kako?”
“What do you mean, ‘friends like that’?”
“Friends who ask for your help in the middle of the night.”
“Is there something wrong if I do?” she replied, barely paying attention. Wondering how Miho looked at the moment, crumpled in her apartment room, Kanako found herself imagining the floor covered in a sea of blood.
“Make sure you help her out, this friend of yours.”
Apparently Takumi had taken Kanako to be the kind of girl who could only make friends in the narrow world of college. She was aware that she was by no means social. He had probably been surprised to hear that she had a close friend back from high school since she rarely spoke of her life before college.
The streets were empty at three in the morning, and it really did only take them around fifteen minutes to arrive. She had him stop in front of the alley that led to the slope.
“Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“If there’s any trouble, call me right away. I’ll come right back.”
“I think it should be fine.”
Even if what she found was a scene of carnage, she had no intention of bringing Takumi into this.
Kanako jogged up the slope. It was the street she had marathoned before. The old apartment building came into view at the top. All of the bicycles crammed into the parking lot had been knocked over.
She could picture it. After raging about in the room and hurting Miho, Akira Nakagaki had fled from the apartment, but still angry, he’d kicked over all of the bicycles.
She climbed up the outer stairs. Miho’s room. The door was metal and the paint was peeling off of it. Kanako rang the doorbell and immediately twisted the doorknob. It wasn’t locked. When she opened the door, it smelled like home. A pot was boiling in the small kitchen next to the entrance. It gave off the scent of miso soup.
Miso soup simmering at three in the morning wasn’t Kanako’s idea of normal, but she entered anyway. The dining room held a table for two, and beside it was a Japanese-style room around eight tatami mats in size. A double-sized bed took up most of it. The sliding glass door was shattered.
Where was Miho? Kanako turned the gas off under the boiling pot before advancing, careful of the scattered shards.
“Miho…?”
She sensed someone in the Japanese-style room. Miho was sprawled in her blind spot. The legs that extended from her shorts were white l
ike those of a wax doll. Kanako leapt over the glass shards and entered the room. Miho was lying face down, and her entire face was covered in blood. Kanako scanned her face for any large wounds but found that the blood had come from her nose.
“Are you okay? Do you recognize me? It’s Kanako.” She’d accidentally given her real name. She hastily backtracked, “I’m Yukako. Kako. Do you recognize me?”
Miho, barely conscious, finally set her eyes on Kanako. Blood was still dripping past her mouth. Kanako looked for some tissues amongst all the makeup and snacks littered across the room. She found some beside the bed, pulled out three sheets, and wiped Miho’s mouth before pressing them against her nose.
“Why are you here, Kako…”
“You called me. Remember?”
“Oh…yeah. So it did reach you, Kako.”
The cell phone lying nearby was also covered in blood.
“Did you get hit bad?”
“I hit him back, though,” Miho said proudly.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?”
“It’s fine, it’s just my face.”
Miho told her what happened.
While Akira had been out, a woman had called, asking in a sweet voice, “Akira, you there?”
“Who’re you,” Miho had asked back.
“So you must be the clingy anemone,” the woman had laughed.
Apparently Akira described Miho to others as a woman who clung to him like an anemone. When Akira returned and Miho interrogated him, he said he’d scouted the girl in Ikebukuro last week. What did he mean by “anemone”? He claimed he didn’t know, he’d never said such a thing. It was with his right hand that Akira ended the long, inconclusive argument that followed. Miho had interrogated him knowing that was how it would end. She was slapped by his open palm until her face was swollen and then slung to the wall. Akira then displayed some footwork from his boxing days and gestured at her to rise.
“I’m so stupid, I should have just stayed down.”
She got up by the eighth count. She jumped back into the fray and kneed his vulnerable parts, and that was when things got serious. Though he still used his open palm, a pair of solid hits to her face rattled her brain, shook her vision, and cut the inside of her nose.
Akira’s rage still didn’t die, and he hurled their electric pot against the glass door. He grabbed all the money in Miho’s wallet and left, and that was as far as she remembered.
“…But how did you know?”
“Know what?” Kanako took some ice out of the freezer and wrapped them in a towel to press against Miho’s cheek. If they cooled it fast enough it wouldn’t swell too badly.
“Where I live. My address.”
“That’s because—” Kanako nearly choked but came up with a quick lie. “When I asked over the phone, your voice was really weak but you told me your address. You don’t remember?”
Miho’s face looked blank as she tried to remember. Kanako prayed that Miho would just accept that she’d given her address while her consciousness had drifted.
“I see. Sorry for causing you trouble. He usually only barely strokes my face, at worst splitting my lip, but it was pretty rough tonight.”
Kanako put her hand to the back of Miho’s head and tried to see if there was any blood. She had hit her head when she’d been thrown to the wall.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”
“I’m fine.”
The tissues pressed to her nose were turning red so Kanako got fresh ones. She made Miho lie on the floor until the blood stopped flowing.
“When this sort of thing happens, he doesn’t come back for around three days. He’ll probably go stay at the Ikebukuro girl’s house or something…Then, when he gets bored, he’ll buy things that I’ll like, like earrings and rings, and say…” She imitated Akira Nakagaki’s voice. “ ‘Man, I’m sorry, Miho. I’m the worst, but I’m seriously no good without you at my side.’ ”
When he spoke to her like that and held her close, she apparently forgave him. What a stupid woman, Kanako thought.
“If it were me, I’d just leave.”
“But see, I’m married, so as his wife I feel like I should at least put up with him a little.”
“A little? Getting beaten until your face swells up?”
“It’s nothing. Compared to what my father did to that family.”
This time, Kanako was silenced. She hadn’t expected her family to come up in this context.
“You know, I sometimes have this thought. Maybe I put up with Akira’s violence because I want it,” Miho said, staring up at a fixed point on the ceiling.
“What do you mean?”
“Every time he hits me, I can’t help but think, ‘Those four people must have felt pain several hundred times worse before they died’…”
Several hundred nails seemed to come flying through the dark, all aimed at Kanako’s heart. She steeled herself and formed a shield before asking her next question.
“In other words…in other words, is this what you mean?” She calmed her nervous voice. “As one of the punishments you’ve inherited from your father, you’re getting beaten as a way of atoning for the family?”
“I forgot when, but Akira said something to me. I’d gotten slapped two or three times, and then he asked, ‘What’s so funny about getting hit, are you crazy or what?’ Apparently I was grinning after getting slapped silly. Creepy, isn’t it?”
Was Miho saying that she was trying to get closer to her father, who was awaiting death behind bars, by getting wounded by her husband?
Perhaps Miho knows who I am. The doubt suddenly reared its head. If confessing to such intense self-loathing were an attempt to earn Kanako’s forgiveness…
No, this woman wasn’t capable of putting on such a sophisticated act. The girl covered in blood before Kanako probably didn’t have a clue who she was.
“It’s like someone inside me is taunting and telling me to make Akira angry, so that he’ll raise his hand against me.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“I’m scared. Once I’m past the stage where I’m smiling, I get really scared, and according to Akira I writhe on the floor and beg for my life. ‘Help me, it hurts, don’t hit me anymore…’ I do it in a child’s voice, too.”
Kanako had heard it over the phone.
“I wonder why I turn into a child. Weird, isn’t it?”
The mystery unraveled. It unraveled because the listener was Kanako, and she decided to poke Miho a bit. “There was a four year old, wasn’t there?”
“…Huh?”
“In the family that was killed.”
Naoki had been four, and Tomoki almost five.
Miho gave a blank stare, but her eyes eventually began to swim. She had caught on.
“Maybe, when he’s hurting you, you turn into that four year old. You’re trying to accept any kind of pain, pretending to be that child,” Kanako informed Miho. A method of atonement chosen unconsciously, as it were.
“Maybe.”
Miho’s expression said that she was fed up with herself for being that way.
The sight of the remains in the morgue at the medical examiner’s office resurfaced in Kanako’s mind.
She hadn’t been allowed to take off the white cloths draped over their bodies, and in the end she had never witnessed the full extent of the physical damage done to her family.
All she’d done there was touch her father’s big toe, her mother’s pointer toe, and her brothers’ little toes.
Kanako couldn’t imagine the pain the four of them had gone through. Meanwhile, here was someone who was forcing herself to imagine the pain by getting beaten by her loved one.
“Miho, your husband is scum.”
Your husband and your father both.
“He hurts a girl with violence, rejoices at the sound, and sneers down at her when she begs for her life sounding like a child…He’s the absolute worst. He’s the type who can just go die.”
Just go die.
The words left Kanako’s mouth with surprising cruelty and flew towards Miho before bouncing back.
Kanako’s face felt aflame from anger. Her eyes watered with tears, and Miho looked up at her with wonder. You don’t have to go that far, Miho seemed to want to protest, but faltered at the tears in Kanako’s eyes.
“It’s partly my fault. I pour oil on the fire, knowing he’ll get mad.”
Miho slowly got up, perhaps because her nose bleeding had finally stopped. She shook her head a few times, dizzy.
“What’s that smell?” Miho sniffed.
“The miso soup was boiling down. I turned off the fire.”
“He really likes miso soup. He always says he wants to drink it, no matter how late I get back, so I make it after my shift at the bar. Then that woman called, and I interrogated him when he got back, and that led to this…”
Miho stood up, still wobbling, and put on slippers to avoid the glass shards as she made her way over to peer into the pot.
“Oh, but it looks good. Want some before you go?”
“Sure, I’ll give it a go.”
Miho poured some into two bowls. It was made with mixed miso and tofu and fried tofu. It had simmered too long so the scent wasn’t what it could have been, but Kanako took one sip and exclaimed, “It’s great!”
“Isn’t it?”
Despite the flecks of blood still on her chin from her nosebleed, Miho smiled proudly. For a while, the only sound was that of the two of them sipping miso soup.
Kanako tried to imagine how Miho and Akira Nakagaki had met.
Right after Miho moved out to Tokyo, perhaps she worked part-time at somewhere like a snack bar in Dogenzaka, and met him there. He might have been the first love of a girl who’d never opened her heart to anyone. He may have been her first man, too.
Back then, Akira Nakagaki had yet to get used to his job as a street scout, which required him to remain standing, and he would complain I’m tired, I’m tired, while rubbing his calves.
I don’t care what, just make me a cocktail, he’d say to Miho. Having just started her night job, her repertoire was limited, and she had no confidence. Akira would say, I don’t care, just try making something, I’ll drink it even if it’s shit, I’ll keep paying until you can make something good to drink.
Deep Red Page 22