“Kinue’s older brother Tsunetaro had been taught the techniques of tattooing from earliest childhood, and he had spent countless hours watching his father wield his needles and brushes. Horiyasu had his heart set on making his son his successor, and he systematically taught him all the tricks and secrets of his art. Just before Tsunetaro took his physical exam for conscription into the army, Horiyasu began tattooing his son’s back as an expression of fatherly devotion, in lieu of the traditional coming-of-age ceremony at a Shinto shrine.
“Until that time Kinue had been struggling to conceal her increasingly desperate desire to be tattooed, but when she saw her brother stretched out on the table she couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Please tattoo me too, Papa,’ she pleaded. ‘I want a great big beautiful one, just like the one you’re giving to Tsunetaro.’
“Horiyasu scolded Kinue soundly for even suggesting such a thing, and he explained to her that it would be impossible for him to deface the skin of his own daughter at such a young age. In truth, it had wrenched his heart to refuse his favorite daughter’s request, and he asked himself afterward why he hadn’t spent a few minutes giving her a tiny hidden tattoo of some sort. If he had just begun the process, it would have been easy to complete it later, once she was married to an understanding husband. But as a parent, he couldn’t very well change his mind after taking such a firm stand.
“On the evening of the second day, Horiyasu returned from making a house call, and Kinue greeted him with a meaningful smile. ‘Papa, I have something to show you. Do you still refuse to tattoo me after this?’ She pulled the right sleeve of her kimono up to the shoulder. One portion of the white skin of her upper arm was pink where the blood had gathered, and it appeared to be somewhat swollen. On that spot, three small cherry blossoms had been finely drawn with indigo ink.
“Horiyasu immediately recognized the flowers as the work of his son, Tsunetaro. His eyes were filled with indescribably deep emotion as he stared at his daughter’s face. ‘See, Papa,’ she said, ‘since you wouldn’t tattoo me, I’m going to get Tsunetaro to tattoo my entire body, so there.’
“All right, Horiyasu thought, you win. His emotions were a mix of pride and sorrow, and relief. ‘Go upstairs and take off all your clothes,’ he murmured with shining eyes, as he unpacked his drawing pens and his bundles of needles. Over a period of three excruciating years Horiyasu tattooed the handsome, evil mountain sorcerer and his menacing snake-familiar on his daughter’s supple skin, and thus was born Kinue of the Orochimaru.
“On the night that her brilliantly colored tattoos were completed, Kinue lay in the rococo arms of her yakuza lover and wept with joy. ‘When the two of us are embracing like this, you can’t see a single bit of white skin,’ she said. ‘This is good. This is perfect. As long as these pictures remain on my skin, my feelings for you will never change.’
“The tattoos didn’t disappear, but the love Kinue thought would last forever soon vanished in a cloud of acrimony and recriminations. After that stormy breakup, Kinue embarked on an aimless odyssey around Japan. She traveled first with one attractive, disreputable man, then another. Eventually she ended up in Yokohama, where she worked as a geisha and indulged her acquired passion for gambling.
“Before long the Great War began. Almost overnight, life in the Land of the Rising Sun became a flaming nightmare of death and destruction, like a medieval image of hell. By some miracle Kinue managed to survive, although her brother and sister were not so lucky. When the smoke finally cleared, Kinue was running a bar called Serpent in the Yurakucho area, and living with a fat, rich, insanely possessive man whom she didn’t love a bit. Such are the compromises of life, she told herself. But her heart and soul were dead.
“Then one day Kinue entered a tattoo contest, and won. As a bonus, on that same day she met a young man who was intelligent, kind, handsome, and loving. Kinue felt her soul returning to life and she thought that maybe, just maybe, the young man might care about her, too. For the first time in a very long time, she began to think that fairy tales might come true, even for a woman who had defaced her body with a snake tattoo.”
9
Toward the end of Kinue’s story, Kenzo had been unconsciously holding his breath. He was afraid to believe his ears. Could she really be saying that she cared for him, and that he might have a role in her tattooed-Cinderella fairy tale?
They were still lying cozily in spoon formation, back to belly. Kinue looked over her decorated shoulder at Kenzo with an expectant expression, and he let out his breath with an almost snakelike hiss. “That was a fascinating story, very well told,” he said. “Can I ask you one terribly personal question?”
“Anything,” Kinue said, kissing his fingertips.
“Do you ever regret having gotten tattooed?”
“No, though I do wish I hadn’t gotten tattooed with such an unlucky design. Maybe an angel, or a princess, or the medieval dancer Shizuka Gozen. Even now I often regret that I didn’t request one of those designs; something gentle, and feminine. And ladylike.”
“When you say unlucky, do you mean because it’s associated with sorcery?”
“No, not exactly that. You must have heard of the Three Curses? You know” ‘The snake eats the frog, the frog eats the slug, the slug dissolves the snake.’”
Kenzo shook his head. “It sounds kind of like ‘Paper, Scissors, Rock,’ only with slimy creatures,” he joked. “But what does that have to do with your tattoo?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know, didn’t you say you were from the Nagano area? Anyway, Orochimaru has a big snake as his sorcerer’s familiar, right?” She pointed at the snake’s head on her shoulder. “If you read the story, you’ll see that Jiraiya’s familiar was a giant toad, and Tsunedahime was always seen riding on an enormous slug. Those three characters lived in the depths of Mount Togakushi in Nagano Prefecture, and they were constantly competing to see who could create the wickedest, most powerful spells. My father saw an old woodblock-print version of the story, and he fell in love with the images. So he tattooed the three curses on his three children. Jiraiya on my older brother, Tsunedahime on my sister Tamae, and Orochimaru on me.”
“And. . . ?”
“And both my brother and sister were killed in the war, while I’ve somehow managed to survive until now. But I have a feeling that I don’t have much longer to live myself. Jiraiya and Tsunedahime both met untimely deaths, and there’s no reason to believe that only Orochimaru would be allowed to live a long, healthy life.”
“That’s just silly superstition.” Kenzo spoke lightly, but he shivered in spite of himself.
“Silly superstition! Before you dismiss it so easily, you should try living inside the skin of someone with one of those doomed tattoos. In any case, it’s not as if I have any great desire to live to a ripe old age, so it doesn’t matter. If I can just live a short life, and live it fully, that’s enough for me. Cry a little, laugh a little, and then it’s over.”
“I don’t know. That strikes me as rather bleak and pessimistic.”
“Oh, please, spare me the sermon. If I were to die right now, at least Professor Hayakawa would be ecstatic. That man is so obsessed with his collection, I wouldn’t put it past him to commit a crime in order to get what he wanted. I really feel sometimes that he might kill me just to get his hands on my tattoo. Remember when he called me away after the contest? He was pestering me to give him some photographs of my tattoo, and he tried yet again to persuade me to let him harvest my skin after I die. I mean, how creepy is that? Then there’s the famous story about the time a yakuza boss from Ueno was brought into the university hospital with one arm chopped off at the shoulder. That boss was a patient of Professor Hayakawa’s, and the professor had already paid the man up front for the right to remove his tattooed skin when he died. The professor was eating lunch with some colleagues in the university cafeteria when he heard the news. Apparently he dropped his chopsticks, jumped to his feet, and cried, ‘But what happened to the tattoos
? Are the tattoos all right?’ Isn’t that awful? I mean, he didn’t even ask about the condition of his patient; all he cared about was getting his grubby hands on the man’s tattoos. Doctor Tattoo isn’t the only weirdo who’s approached me, either. The world is full of men with strange obsessions who will stop at nothing to get what they want.” Kinue seemed terribly upset, and after she finished speaking she buried her face in the sofa and dissolved in tears.
It was an illusion, of course, but Kenzo thought he could hear the rustling of the scales on the great serpent that reared its head on Kinue’s right shoulder. There was no question in his mind but that the same chilly blood was flowing in the veins of Kinue Nomura and her snake tattoo. Was she a woman, or a snake?
After all that had happened on that entrancing evening, the distinction had become blurred in Kenzo’s mind. He was certain of one thing, though. All the old folktales he had read about the passionate lubriciousness of snake-women were true, to judge from the intoxicating feast he had experienced that night.
“Please don’t cry,” Kenzo whispered. “I want to make love to you again.” He got down on his knees and gently placed his lips on Kinue’s back, right on the tattooed lips of the fearsome sorcerer Orochimaru.
“Oh,” Kinue sighed, with a catch in her breath. “My dear darling Kenzo, my wonderful, beautiful lover.”
10
Near the entrance to the famous Specimen Room at Tokyo University, there was a lavishly gilded casket that housed an ancient Egyptian mummy, said by some to have been the favorite concubine of King Tut himself. Elsewhere in the room, the disembodied brains of such celebrated novelists as Natsume Soseki and Kanzo Uchimura were on display, floating dreamily in formaldehyde. Then there was the distinguished married couple, both professors of medicine, who had willed their bodies to science in the 1920s. Now their perfect ivory skeletons stood at attention by the entrance, like a pair of sentries. Interesting though these objects were, the most riveting thing in the room was the collection of vividly colored, intricately-tattooed skins hanging on the walls and suspended from the ceiling. They looked to Kenzo like an eerie parade of souls in limbo, and he gazed at them in awe and fascination.
The amber-patinaed human hides, preserved with fixative and stretched over special frames, had the visual appeal and textural richness of a Flemish tapestry. Horned demons, folk heroes, Chinese lions, dragons, peonies, cherry blossoms, sea creatures, characters from Kabuki plays, the designs were elaborate, and diverse. Kenzo could almost see the people writhing in agony under the needle while the tattoo master, breathing heavily from the sheer physical exertion, poured his soul into the creation of a picture that would outlive its mortal host.
Taken one by one, you could certainly say that these leathery specimens were valid works of art. Unlike a gallery of paintings, though, the assembly of human skins created a surrealistic, unsettling atmosphere. Kenzo was staring at the otherworldly torsos in a trance, trying to imagine those desiccated, decorative skins wrapped around living human flesh. When someone tapped him on the shoulder, he almost jumped out of his shoes.
Standing behind him was Professor Hayakawa, dressed in his trademark ice-cream suit, with the familiar ironical smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He wore a starched white shirt and a precisely knotted necktie of sea-blue silk, and he carried a walking stick of lacquered rattan. Something about the professor’s natty getup suggested that he had managed to maintain a certain sartorial style, even in those desperate times. The dapper attire was like a suit of armor, worn as a shield against a world in chaos.
“Ah, Sensei,” Kenzo stammered. He was so surprised that he forgot to bow.
“Don’t ‘Ah, Sensei’ me,” said the professor tartly. “What’s wrong with you, anyway, wandering around looking as if you’d been bewitched by foxes? You’d better watch out. I’ve heard there are a lot of supernatural creatures at large in Tokyo these days.”
Kenzo felt awkward and embarrassed, for he was certain that the professor must be able to tell just by looking at him that he had spent the previous night immersed in illicit passion with Kinue Nomura. Earlier that morning Kenzo had awakened in his own bed with only three desires: to eat breakfast, to make love to Kinue again, and to learn more about tattoos. Since the second was not an immediate option, Kenzo downed a hasty meal of miso soup and seaweed-wrapped rice balls, then set off to revisit the tattoo exhibit at Tokyo University, where he was a postgraduate research fellow.
“Come along,” said Professor Hayakawa. “As long as you’re here, I’ll give you the tour.” Leading the way, the professor expounded on his favorite topic. “So you see, even after people die their skin outlives them!” he said in an agitated voice, gesturing around the room. The expression on his face was a curious mixture of excitement and rapture.
“Tattooing is definitely an art form,” Kenzo said. “I do agree with you about that, and I’ve recently learned to appreciate the beauty of the art tattoo. But tell me, speaking not as a collector but strictly as a physician and a rational man, don’t you think it’s stupid to undergo so much pain and expend so much energy on self-mutilation? I mean, surely no one with an iota of common sense would ever do such a thing.”
“If you say it’s idiotic, maybe it is,” the professor retorted. “And if you say it shows a complete lack of common sense, that’s probably true as well. But on the other hand, tattooing has something of the same seductive, addictive appeal as opium. Once you become enslaved by its charm, that’s the end. You’re hooked for life, and there’s no way to resist. Here’s a perfect example.” He gestured in the direction of one of the specimen room’s more striking exhibits: a complete human skin, tattooed from head to foot, and everywhere in between.
“This is a former president of the Edo Tattoo Society named Yasokichi Murakami. Murakami was an usher at the Shintomi Theater in Asakusa, and he wasn’t merely tattooed on his back, chest, thighs, and upper arms, as is customary. As you can see, his tattoos also covered his face and head, his fingers and toes, his eyelids, the insides of his ears, and even his private parts. The only place where his skin remained as blank as the day he was born were the palms of his hands. When strangers saw the man’s face from a distance, they often mistook him for a foreigner And when they got close enough to see that his face was a solid mask of tattoos, many people couldn’t help shrieking in surprise.”
The professor paused to light a cigarette, in open defiance of the NO SMOKING signs posted above every door. He took three or four wolfish drags, then stubbed the cigarette out on the bottom of his beige leather shoe and kicked the butt under a glass table. On top of that table was a display of disarticulated hand bones with missing finger joints. YAKUZA EXTREMITIES, the label read, referring to the custom among Japanese gangsters of chopping off bits of their fingers to atone for errors in judgment or social gaffes in that highly ritualistic world.
“Anyway,” the professor went on, “when I try to imagine the state of mind that made Murakami want to penetrate every pore with the most permanent of ink, I always get a chilly feeling in my heart. He may have been a living work of art, but I think what he did to himself goes beyond mere enthusiasm, into the dark realm of obsession. Not that I wouldn’t give my left arm to have his skin hanging in my living room, you understand.” The professor paused for a moment with a distracted look on his face, then continued. “As you know, if you walk around the men’s side of a public bathhouse you’ll often see a number of decorated bodies. One man might have a woman’s name or two tattooed amateurishly on his arms, while another might sport a half-finished portrait of some folk-lore hero on his back. But the fully realized fine-art tattoos, like the exhibits here, are another matter altogether. You could count on two hands the number of tattoo artists who could legitimately be called masters, and still have some fingers left over.…”
Kenzo couldn’t stop himself from making the obvious joke. “Maybe not, if you were a yakuza,” he quipped, holding up a hand with the pinkie folded back.
“Of course, no list of post-Meiji tattoo artists would be complete without the renowned Horicho the First. As you may know, he created a nationwide scandal in Japan in 1900 by committing ‘love suicide’ with a woman who was not his wife. Honcho had already left his mark on posterity, not just in Japan but overseas as well, by tattooing highly publicized dragons on the forearms of the English Duke of York, who became King George V, and the czarevitch of Russia, later Czar Nicholas II. At the time, Horicho’s was the only legal tattoo parlor left open in Yokohama. It was there—attracted, no doubt, by a sign that read ‘For Foreigners Only’—that both George and Nicholas got their dragons.
“Aside from these serious tattoo artists, the only people who were doing tattoos in those days were rank amateurs who didn’t even have the skill to work with red pigments. Hence, the murky blue-black coloration of their clumsy designs. Even for the most accomplished masters, though, expressing their artistic sensibilities wasn’t as simple as running an ink-dipped brush over a clean sheet of paper. With a living canvas such as human skin, whether or not a tattoo artist could produce a work of art that satisfied him depended in great measure upon the subject. The ideal, of course, was pale, velvety, fine-grained skin without a single birthmark, scar, or blemish.
Tattoo Murder Case Page 5