by Ryu Murakami
Damned impressive for a sixteen-year-old, thought Aoyama. He was sitting on the living-room sofa, with his bare feet up on the coffee-table, eating yogurt. It was the last Sunday of January. Shige had left early that morning to go skiing with a friend, saying he probably wouldn’t be home till late but not to wait up. Gangsta was outside, barking as usual. Born to hunt, the beagle was big on vocalising. He’d howl along with ambulance sirens, bay at sparrows and crows, and sometimes even yelp at insects crawling over the ground.
Aoyama had walked to a nearby market earlier to purchase the yogurt, along with salmon roe in soy sauce, deep-fried tofu and cabbage rolls. He had no appetite whatsoever, and food still turned to ashes in his mouth, but he knew he had to maintain at least the will to get back on his feet, if only for Shige’s sake. Two things were necessary, he believed, in order to maintain that will: work he could get motivated about, and proper nourishment. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life showing Shige how weak and pathetic he was.
He mixed some honey into the yogurt and sat there on the sofa forcing himself to eat it. Even something as soft and mild as yogurt was difficult to swallow. It wasn’t that his system was actively rejecting food, but as if the nerves were too busy retracing memories of Yamasaki Asami to send out signals demanding nourishment. He’d only been with her once, yet images of her naked breasts and sex, her hips and fingertips, streamed incessantly through his mind. He’d look at a top nude model in some magazine, and his entire nervous system would insist that there was no comparison. It was like a narcotic, he thought, and not just metaphorically. Her voice and smell and touch had provided him with exactly the same sort of thing, chemically speaking, that certain drugs provide, and the receptors in his brain were clamouring for her. There was nothing else that could take her place, as far as his nervous system was concerned. The nerves were honest, and strictly physiological. Reasoning didn’t work with them.
He was listening to music as he ate the yogurt. With his nerves as battered as they were, it had become painfully clear to him how irritating television can be. You may be feeling like shit, the TV screams at you, but the rest of the world is carrying on just fine! He’d begun listening to a lot of classical music – from Bach to Debussy, from gloomy, minor-key symphonies to lighthearted piano pieces. Nothing was less abrasive or helped the time to pass better than classical music. A single Mozart piano concerto lasted about thirty minutes, for example, and listening to Nos. 20 to 27 ate up four whole hours. Of course, not even the magic of Barenboim’s piano could obliterate the unbearably evocative image of Yamasaki Asami, and not even Mozart could neutralise the suffering. But the beauty of the melodies and arrangements was soothing to the nerves, and if he just sat drinking in that beauty, the second hand on his watch would continue its leisurely sweep, and eventually night would arrive. Then he could reach for the cognac or whisky.
He forbade himself spirits during the daytime. He’d realised within a couple weeks of Yamasaki Asami’s disappearance that alcohol was no way to deal with the agony. Several hungover mornings, after too little sleep, Aoyama had experienced an almost debilitating sense of self-loathing, seeing himself as a total failure in life. Deep grief was like a physical wound, and too much alcohol only impaired the healing process.
What he was drinking with his yogurt at two in the afternoon on this Sunday, therefore, was a cup of Fortnum & Mason apple tea. The music was a collection of Verdi overtures. Playing right now was Von Karajan conducting La Forza del Destino. The collection would consume about forty minutes, and then he’d listen to a little Wagner. After that, some of Mozart’s later quartets and violin sonatas, and by the time these were finished he’d be well into the night. He’d take his time soaking in the bath, then break out the beer and eat his deep-fried tofu and cabbage rolls. After dinner he’d listen to Brahms’s Hungarian Dances and Strauss’s Metamorphosen, and then, with two hours to bedtime, he’d allow himself some cognac and put on a Chopin nocturne. He had several – Ashkenazy, Rubinstein, Pollini, Horowitz – and he listened to one every night before going to bed. The piano always seemed to speak to him, saying, Well, we’ve made it through another day. Time to think about turning in.
He had a performance by Michelangeli that he hadn’t listened to yet, and it was as he was thinking he’d check it out tonight that he first noticed something different about the atmosphere of the living-room. It was a vague sensation, as if he’d caught a faint whiff of some unforgettable fragrance, or heard a brief, barely noticeable ringing in his ears, or seen someone flit across the edge of his field of vision, or all three at once, and he leaned forwards on the sofa and looked around the room. ‘Rie-san?’ he said. It was her day off, but maybe she’d decided to drop by and fix dinner. She was genuinely worried about him, and it wouldn’t be unlike her to do something like that.
‘Rie-san?’
There was no answer. He sniffed at the air and looked towards the kitchen. Maybe something was burning. When he’d got up to go to the toilet a while ago, had he lit the stove to warm up the cabbage rolls? He’d been so unmindful and distracted lately that he wouldn’t put it past himself to forget something like that. Leaning further forwards, he could see beyond the counter to the stove. None of the burners were lit. So what had just happened? He sat back and picked up the remote control to lower the volume on The Sicilian Vespers. One difference he was certain of: Gangsta was no longer barking, or making any other noise. Except when asleep, Gangsta was always either barking or scrabbling about, making his presence audible in one way or another – with his chain scraping across the edge of his doghouse, his tail flapping back and forth against his hindquarters, his hind leg thumping against the ground as he scratched himself, his footsteps pattering back and forth – but now there was only silence.
When he tried to call Gangsta’s name he found that his vocal cords refused to vibrate or produce any sound, and that in fact he was having difficulty breathing. This discovery caused a sudden jolt of anxiety. He reached for the apple tea and took a sip, but he couldn’t taste anything. Was something wrong with his sense of taste, too? Or had someone switched his cup? Maybe Shige had come home early, sneaked quietly into the house and decided to play a little trick on his old man, Aoyama was thinking, when a weird and spine-chilling sound split the silence. It was a sound like rusty hinges creaking, but he couldn’t tell if it came from somewhere in the house or somewhere between his own ears. Everything went dark for a moment, and the sofa seemed to lift and then slam back down to the floor. And then, from the corner of the living-room, came a clear, succinct voice.
‘Can’t move, can you?’
When the curtains billowed and Yamasaki Asami emerged from behind them, he wondered if he was hallucinating. Where have you been? he tried to say, but the inside of his mouth was numb and no words came out.
She walked up to him and took hold of his face, squeezing his cheeks together with the thumb and index finger of her left hand. She was wearing rubber surgical gloves. The pressure of her grip was enough to force his mouth open, but he didn’t feel any pain. All the strength had drained from his body, and it now seemed as if her one-handed grip was the only thing that kept him from sliding off the sofa. Drool was dribbling down his jaw. In her right hand she held a very thin plastic hypodermic. She showed it to him.
‘Go to sleep for a while. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to start. Your body will be like a corpse, but I’ll make sure your nerves are all wide awake. That way the pain will be a hundred times worse. So get some sleep while you can.’
She inserted the needle at the base of his tongue.
The liquid in the hypodermic seemed to saturate his body in no time. Aoyama did fall asleep, but for what seemed like only a moment. He was awakened by an excruciating pain in his eyeballs – as though they’d been speared from the inside with long pins that penetrated out through his pupils. His tears had a faintly medicinal smell. He couldn’t move, couldn’t so much as wiggle a finger, but certain sensations were e
xtraordinarily vivid. He was able to work his jaw slightly, the feeling was back in his tongue and his sense of smell had returned. The tears misted his vision, and yet even the mist had a certain shining, crystal clarity. It was like peering through a fish-eye lens. Each time he blinked, he saw what looked like the after-image of a dead tree – probably the tiny capillaries on the retina itself – and heard something like the click of a camera shutter. Every little sound was amplified, and when Yamasaki Asami peered into his face and said ‘Hello again’, her voice reverberated like cathedral bells. His first reaction on realising that she was going to murder him was not, strangely enough, terror, but the sort of feeling of closure one has upon finally solving a puzzle. It hadn’t just been a misunderstanding after all. It was about Shige. She hadn’t been able to accept or forgive the fact that Aoyama had a son whom he adored.
Nor had Yamasaki Asami ever overcome, as Aoyama had believed, the trauma of being raised by a stepfather who beat and abused and reviled her. She still carried that trauma, still lived with it every day. Any man who betrayed or lied to her was the same as her stepfather; therefore, according to her reasoning, such men should have their feet severed to resemble him more closely. When not working at the part-time job that covered living expenses, she spent all her time preparing for the next operation. She would become intimate with a man and simultaneously begin forging a plan to cut off his feet should he prove to be just like her stepfather. In her teens, she’d only dreamed up the plans and never carried them out. She didn’t have a proper tool, for one thing. It was while watching a cooking show on TV that she’d discovered the wire saw – a thin steel cable with teeth, and a ring attached to either end. The TV chef had used it to cut effortlessly through a ham on the bone, saying that there was simply no other tool to match it for this sort of task. The wire saw had made everything possible. She read up on pharmaceuticals as well, and found a way to get her hands on whatever drugs she needed. Thorazine, benzodiazepines, meprobamate, Valium, medazepam, Librium, nitrous oxide, muscimole, amphetamines, psilocin, LSD. She had cased Aoyama’s home a number of times and even broken in before. Having lurked outside since morning, she knew the housekeeper hadn’t shown up, and she’d seen Shige leave with his skis. She’d slipped inside the house the moment Aoyama stepped out to the market. On his return he’d gone to the bathroom, and she’d taken that opportunity to add a muscle relaxant to the honey and yogurt mixture. If he hadn’t made things that easy, she would have been prepared to walk right up to him, say hello and spray him with mace; but he would have collapsed to the floor, and she much preferred having him propped up on the sofa like this. It would facilitate her work and make for a far more interesting picture.
She went outside and came back with Gangsta in her arms. She plopped the dog down on the coffee-table, between Aoyama’s outstretched legs, and that was when the terror kicked in. Gangsta was as limp-limbed as a Beanie Baby, but at least that meant he was probably still alive. Brushing the beagle hairs from her black sweater, Yamasaki Asami went to the entryway, where she’d placed a photographer’s equipment bag. She took out a square black leather case, opened it by pressing on the corners, and pulled out something that looked almost like a portable headphones set – a thin, silvery, metallic cable wound in a circle, at either end of which was a ring the size of a large coin. She put her index finger through one of the rings and let go of the loop of cable. The glittering wire saw unwound with a sound like crossed swords. She wrapped the cable around the joint of Gangsta’s hind leg, then took firm hold of both rings and looked up at Aoyama. Aside from the fact that she wasn’t wearing make-up, her face was the same as ever. Are you sure it’s all right? I’m so glad. I’ve never had anyone I can discuss my problems with before. Can I really count on you to call? Nothing in her expression distinguished her from the Yamasaki Asami who’d once said things like this to him. No psychotic gleam shone in her eyes, her hair wasn’t standing on end, her mouth wasn’t twisted in a maniacal grin.
She pulled the rings in opposite directions, as if stretching a chest-expander. There was a popping of ligaments and the awful sound of bone snapping, and Gangsta’s leg became disconnected from the rest of him. The white fur of his stomach was instantaneously awash in red. Yamasaki Asami quietly extracted the saw and began winding it around Gangsta’s other hind leg. Aoyama tried to tell her to stop, but he had no voice. The Verdi overtures were still playing, at a low volume. Aida.
Stop it. He mouthed the words soundlessly.
‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘Did you say something?’
Not the dog, he tried to say. Do me, not the dog. And as he struggled to move his lips, he pictured Shige. Without a way to stop the bleeding, Aoyama knew he could die from an amputation like that. Then Shige would be truly alone. Shige was a good kid. The thought of making him suffer, of causing him any more pain, was unbearable.
He had to fight back somehow.
‘The dog first, then you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to watch him lose his head?’
Having finished wrapping the instrument around Gangsta’s other leg, she pulled on the rings. The same awful sound. This time the blood splattered more, and some of it landed on the back of Aoyama’s hand. Was there a way to stop this? If only someone would come. Not a salesman or delivery person, who would simply leave when no one answered the door, but someone who’d notice something amiss and investigate. If he could somehow toss one of Gangsta’s severed legs out into the front yard, a passer-by might see it and . . . No. The two fur-covered objects lying there on the table were scarcely recognisable even to him. Anyone who’d never seen the severed leg of a dog might take it for a broken umbrella, or an odd-shaped handbag.
Maybe he could start a fire. If the house were burning, the fire department would come. But would they find him in time to save him? He couldn’t walk, but maybe he could get to the floor, roll to the sliding glass doors and escape to the yard. No matches or lighters were at hand, however, and he wouldn’t have been able to manipulate them anyway. The Aida overture was nearing the end. The next selection was Masquerade Ball, and then Aroldo. What if he raised the volume? With an awkward jerk of his arm he reached the remote control beside him on the sofa. Yamasaki Asami, winding the wire saw around Gangsta’s neck, looked up at him. With unfeeling fingers he pressed the + key on the volume control, and when it reached maximum, he punched lock. Then, twisting to the left, he managed to force the remote control down between the back cushion and the springs. At full volume, the Bose speakers literally rattled the windows and caused the curtains to sway. Yamasaki Asami calmly stepped to the sofa and tried to retrieve the remote control, but it was wedged between the springs and she couldn’t get it out even after flinging the cushion aside. Aoyama remembered that once, when Shige was blasting a Mr Children CD, a neighbour had rung up to complain. According to Shige the caller had been ‘some old biddy’ who’d threatened to call the police if he didn’t turn it down. If only she’d ring up again and then, not getting an answer, call the police! Yamasaki Asami gave up on trying to extract the remote control and walked over to the audio rack beside the drinks cabinet. She seemed to be spewing some sort of abuse at him, but he couldn’t hear her over the roar of the Berlin Philharmonic. She tried turning the volume dial on the amp and then pushing the stop/open button on the CD player, but with the remote control on lock none of the functions could be activated manually. The wall socket was behind the massive drinks cabinet, and there was no way to pull the plug. The music blasting through the living-room only heightened the unreality of the scene. A beagle with two severed limbs lay on the coffee-table in a pool of blood between the outstretched legs of a paralysed middle-aged man, while a beautiful young woman in a black sweater, jeans and sneakers moved about serenely in the background.
When Gangsta opened his eyes, Aoyama screamed – or tried to. His frozen vocal cords produced only a feeble squawk that not even he himself could hear over the thunderous music. The dog, whether because of the pain or beca
use of whatever drug he’d been administered, was unable to bark or move, but his eyes said it all. They were the eyes of a creature gazing at its own death, a creature who’d been robbed of every last vestige of courage and dignity, and they filled Aoyama with horror. Never before had he seen in any eyes, animal or human, such a look of utter despair.
Yamasaki Asami walked to the entryway and turned on the lights. Then she opened her equipment bag and took out a knife.
12
It wasn’t a weapon, only a small penknife of the sort one might use to clean one’s fingernails. The handle was pink, and the tip of the blade was rounded. There was nothing frantic or even hurried about Yamasaki Asami’s movements, and her face was still a placid mask, as it had been even during the severing of Gangsta’s legs.
She was looking for a place to cut the electrical cord. The amp and CD player and cassette deck were all combined in one unit that fit snugly into a custom-built shelf and couldn’t be removed without disassembling the entire audio rack. The rack was flush against the side of the big drinks cabinet, and both were bolted to the wall at the back to prevent them from toppling in the event of an earthquake. She fetched Aoyama’s fork from the coffee-table and inserted it in the narrow space beneath the amp, trying to snag the cord. If she could draw it out and cut it with her little knife, the music would stop, and his meagre rebellion would be quashed. He was going to die in the midst of this chaos and madness. It was too sudden, too soon, but maybe that was always true of death. It was probably best to resign himself after all, and to face the end with some measure of equanimity. Yamasaki Asami was still fishing for the cord. Even with the lights on, the narrow space beneath the amp was pitch dark, and she had to work purely by feel.