*
Sinking into the stillness of the night, I have been thinking not only of Maya but also of her uncle I encountered at the chic cafe in Shibuya the other evening.
Before the accidental meeting took place, we had been chatting about the sensational parricide carried out by the fifteen-year-old boy who was in a junior high school. I pointed out that if Yukio had been still with us, he must have been interested in the murder case. I also explained that the origin of the English word MANTIS came from Greek meaning PROPHET.
‘We call a mantis kama-kiri. It literally means…’
‘The Reaper with a scythe,’ answered Maya.
‘Yes, that’s Death.’
‘But it’s also taken to be a woman who devours men.’
‘Have you ever heard of the word Oni from Yukio?’
“Oni? Do you mean this?”
Maya pressed her fists against both sides of the temple and then stuck her forefingers straight up.
I gave her a wry smile.
‘Maya, you look too cute to be called Oni.’
‘I don’t remember whether he ever mentioned the word. Have you?’
I shake my head. I had never heard him saying the word in person either. I had only seen his scribble of the word Oni on newspaper clippings.
She said, ‘But I do remember that Yukio used to be fascinated by any incident that appeared to have something to do with human atrocities.’
‘It looks like he had been obsessed with Oni.’
‘He must have been,’ she whispered unemotionally.
I was about to nod approvingly when a male voice called out to Maya. It was a middle-aged man’s. He seemed to have just stepped in this cafe. He was with his party, all males, all in dark business suit, although the man himself was wearing only a casual shirt and a cardigan with no necktie. I noticed Maya stiffen soon after she made a feminine bow at an angle of five degrees to the man who had rushed to our table, smiling gleefully.
She introduced me to the man as her best friend and him to me as her uncle. I rose from my seat and made a polite thirty-degree bow to Mr. Hirose the middle-aged man who was wearing a heavy-looking wristwatch decorated with gold and diamonds that looked unreachably expensive. But I happened to notice that Maya’s face was distorted with disgust when she glanced down at his gaudy wristwatch.
Mr. Hirose told me, ‘I am her father’s older brother. And Maya is my niece. The dearest one.’
After he exchanged sociable bows at an angle of five degrees with his party, Mr. Hirose came back to our table, looking rather delighted. And he asked me if I had time to have a dinner with him.
‘Let me treat you both to any cuisine you like. Chinese, Korean, Italian, French, or whatever. You name it.’
Mr. Hirose also said that he wouldn’t keep us long.
I thought I was lucky and excited and then started thinking how to make an excuse to my mother.
But Maya declined with thanks in a sweet manner.
‘Oh, Maya. Why?’ Mr. Hirose made a perplexed frown.
‘I’m truly sorry, uncle, but Luna and I were planning to go to the cinema.’
I was startled. So seemed her uncle.
‘But, Maya, I believe movies should be showing for a fixed period of time. I gave those fellow traders quite inconvenience by asking them to change the schedule.’
‘I know, but this movie will close tonight after a run of only two weeks. This evening is the last chance for us.’
‘That’s too bad. What a shame.’
Maya told him, without hesitating, the title of the movie and briefly described its storyline.
Mr. Hirose looked obviously disappointed. I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him and myself as well since the prospect of being treated to exotic cuisine had vanished.
When Maya rose from her seat and urged me to leave the cafe as quickly as possible, I could tell by the look of Mr. Hirose that he was most likely aware she was telling a lie. It felt so awkward that it was almost painful. Out on the street Maya again told me that Mr. Hirose was the uncle who had been cut off from her family a long time ago.
‘I’ve heard it three times already. And you don’t know the reason, do you?’
Maya responded to the question only with a twisted smile of anguish.
Pyramid
As my mother used to grumble, our Japanese prefabricated house has very thin walls, like those of a cardboard box. She has now given up the dream of buying a new house and I can enjoy the comedy program on my neighbor’s cable television for free.
Tonight I am sensing the heavy presence of my parents in the bedroom right below. I sometimes feel as if I were a captive in strangers’ house in a strange city.
I lie down and stretch myself out on my bed and look up at the ceiling. There is an enigmatic grain, but not of wood, for the ceiling is made from synthetic resins. It looks natural but is actually artificial.
The same logic can be applied to my body. On last Christmas Eve my father said to me with a worried look: Your mother has been feeding you with a variety of instant noodles. A great amount of them. Everyday. Also you’ve been surrounded by a lot of synthetic materials. Almost everything in this house is, as a matter of fact, synthetic. So I’m deeply worried whether your brain would keep working properly after your seventeenth birthday next year. In fact I often see this nightmare in which your brain will turn into a walnut-shaped plastic specimen of the human brain that is hollow. I am also afraid that your fingers and toes might start to grow vinyl nails. To be honest, I can’t understand what you’re made of at all.
Thanks, daddy. I was intensely moved by the heartfelt expressions of your worries and fears.
While a lot of things are happening all over the world, my everyday life has been as monotonous as the beat of a metronome.
I studied hard yesterday. I have studied hard this evening. And I will study hard tomorrow. The weather won’t change.
All of a sudden the blanket covering my belly begins to swell up and to shape itself into something like a derby hat. I utter a faint cry and try to flatten it but the top of the rising blanket continues to swell up and grows to be almost the same height as that of a toddler. I am about to scream in horror the instant I see the top of that pyramidal swell start moving slowly up toward this way or, I must say, slithering its way up toward my chin. Then two pale hands appear from under the blanket and slowly pull off both the blanket and the futon. What comes into view out of it is Yukio, specifically speaking, the upper portion of him.
Voila. Good evening, my girl.
Oh my god.
Which god are you calling, Luna? Jesus, Buddha, or Allah?
Did you have to do that?
Remind me of what I did?
You looked too theatrical.
Well, I think boredom is a deadly poison. We need entertainment, don’t we?
You’re always a pain in the…in the chrysanthemum.
A pain in the chrysanthemum? That’s good.
Then Yukio burst into laughter. It must be triggered by his paroxysm of laughter.
You’re such a pervert. Your intestines feel especially slimy tonight.
Pervert? You’re the one who gazed at the swallow-tailed butterfly on your same-sex friend’s panties, aren’t you?
Is there anything wrong with that?
Maya caught you after all, Luna. The chaser became the chased.
Please remember that I could find the secret Maya wanted to conceal from us so desperately.
Oh, I see. Does the secret happen to be selling her own panties?
Yes.
Beep. That was not the case.
How come you can be so sure?
You have to recall what she said word by word.
Try me.
You were told that what you had found out was not her true secret.
I think she was trying to mystify me. That’s all.
Beep. It’s a wrong answer. What did she say after that?
She said like�
�I was the only one in Yukio’s circle who didn’t know her hobby, which was selling undies.
Beep. You missed the point. Try to remember exactly what she said. She said that her hobby was not recorded in Cahier de Secret. Can’t you remember the word Cahier de Secret?
Cahier de Secret?
Yes, Secret Notebook. Have you ever thought that there might be some kind of notebook in which I Yukio recorded their secret?
Oh, I see. That sounds quite reasonable.
No, don’t give me that troubling look, Luna.
The same idea hit on me that day, so I searched your room but found nothing of that kind.
Beep. You searched the wrong place.
Wait a minute.
Yes, that’s right. There is always a secret place to hide things.
You mean…there?
Ting-a-ling. Do you want me to play a fanfare?
Ah, yes, we used to hide DVDs in that place every time we made the copy of a digitally downloaded movie.
In our junior high school days. Nothing is more subversive than a plenty of photos of endangered animals collected from all over the Net.
We’re planning how to sell those photos in the future where all endangered animals would have already disappeared from the surface of the globe.
It sounds silly, but it was fun, right?
That was fun, but I’m not convinced of your confession, Yukio.
Everything I said in the DVD was true.
I don’t believe you. You’re getting heavy, I can hardly breathe.
It’s due to your chronic asthma, you know.
I’m tired. I’m sleepy.
All right, Luna. Sleep tight. Have a good nightmare.
Oh no, you’re squeezing me so tight…but it feels good.
Enjoy anything pleasurable while you can feel it. It won’t last long. That’s the nature of pleasure.
Smiley
Last five days, Reiko has been trying to stand right behind me on the platform of Shinjuku railroad station in the morning. And she succeeded in taking up the position three times. I have to admit that Reiko has achieved a good success rate if I take account of waves of the crowd spreading all over the station.
‘I can prick you anytime,’ whispers Reiko from behind. ‘Or do you want me to shove you forward with my little finger?’
I became nervous. That might be why the public-announce system in the station sounded to me like the following: Ladies and Gentlemen, please visit Japan, the land of anime and console game, if you want to leave your life peacefully. We can provide some of the best treatment for people with death wish. Our service is speedy, clean, and painless. Your long-cherished dream will always come true in the straight Chuo line or the looped Yamate line. We guarantee both lines to be inescapably doomed. Please call Japan Suicide Tour toll-free at X-XXX-XXXXX. We are waiting for your call.
Each time Reiko frightened me in half fun, however, I turned around and said, ‘Watch out, Reiko. Maybe Mr. Buddha is sneaking a look at you from somewhere inside this crowd.’
And it worked well and still works well.
Everyone in our class knows that Mr. Buddha has this covert obsession with Reiko. She told me that, during an examination, he dropped a hint to her by stealthily pointing at one of choices in a multiple-choice test despite that Mr.
Buddha had been known for his fairness. Since then Reiko came to loathe the sight of Mr. Buddha. She also said that she had gooseflesh all over her when she noticed that she had been shadowed by him after school.
Our tender-looking popular teacher might be in the final stage for eruption. If it happens, I think, Mr. Buddha would become the Smiley Face that is dribbling blood from its affably arched mouth.
Piano
I am on my way from school to Yukio’s house and my heart keeps beating fast. Walking up this familiar slope might be the cause of it.
The professor emeritus looks somewhat gloomy. I make a courteous bow at an angle of forty-five degrees and, after taking off my shoes, enter the living room. Yukio’s grandmother seems to be coughing heavily in the room at the end of the corridor. Although she has been confined to bed since that incident, I am still able to feel the sign of her presence, of her laceration, everywhere in this house.
After Yukio’s seventy-three-year-old grandfather has served me a cup of green tea, I hand him a gift-boxed apple tart as a complimentary present.
“This is from my mother, sir.” I tell him a lie.
“Oh, you don’t have to do this.”
Then he asks me if I like an ohagi, a rice ball coated with sweetened red beans. I say yes and, as soon as the professor emeritus excuses himself from the living room, I rush to crouch down underneath the key bed of Yukio’s worn-out upright piano. But to open its bottom panel is not as easy as I imagined. My heart starts beating so fast I feel dizzy with my hands that have been already covered in cold sweat. And the moment I have found that there is concealed neither notebook nor of that kind inside but only piano wires strung vertically, the professor emeritus asks me, standing at the door with a tea tray in his hands, looking composed, if there is something wrong with the piano.
It makes me jump so abruptly I bump my head against the underside of the keyboard.
“No, sir. Not at all.”
“Affirmative?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What were you searching for then?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m wondering if there might be anything that awakened your interest behind that bottom panel. That's a quite heavy panel, I suppose.”
“Oh, well, nothing in particular, sir. I just wanted to see how the inside structure of the upright piano looks like.”
“And?”
“And it was certainly very interesting to look at.”
“How?”
“Well, to me, it looked exactly like the inside of an upright piano, sir.”
“Good for you. Why don’t you finish off your green tea before it gets cold?”
Then Yukio’s grandfather has fallen silent so deep as to let me feel increasingly ill at ease for sitting on a sofa face to face with him.
We sip another cups of hot green tea. We even give off no sighs. Staring at our respective directions, we chew ohagi as languidly as two cows in a field in early spring.
The cup of green tea tastes profoundly bitter and ohagi painfully sweet.
When I am about to leave, the professor emeritus asks me to sit down on the sofa and starts talking: ‘Some rumor says that you’ve been trying to unearth who was responsible for the death of my grandson Yukio. You seem to consider it as a murder case, don’t you? Oh, it’s such a grotesque idea. The rumor came as an unexpected shock to my wife, a negative one, of course. I would like you to understand that we took this tragedy as an accident and tried to accept it as an accident.
As you might have also heard, the police concluded that Yukio had taken his own life. They were simply mistaken.
That report could not be true. I refused to accept it because they seemed to jump illogically to the conclusion through over-simplification. It wouldn’t do any good to hastily connect the following two things, namely, the fact that my grandson was the top student in a highly competitive private high school and the fact that he was killed by a railroad accident, and, therefore, to suppose that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between the two.
Did Yukio feel the sense of pressure because he had been constantly expected to be the top? Not that I know of. If it were actually the case, then any Nobel laureate wouldn’t be allowed to travel around Japan by train. It sounded nothing other than a sheer nonsense. And it still seems to be nothing more than a mere rubbish.
Neither my wife nor I believed what the police told us because we were the ones who brought up our grandson under our own care. We knew about Yukio better than anyone else. This is a simple fact. They are outsiders and my wife and I shall never let the spirit of my grandson fall into strange hands. We have taken a pledge to protect
his spirit.
Then came this scandal. Someone whom we have not only known very well but also very much liked for a long time has suddenly started talking as if our grandson had been murdered by someone with whom we might even have had personal acquaintance. It was like a hailstorm at starry night.
Could you possibly imagine how we would feel your theory?
My wife and I were both painfully disappointed by you.
Tell me what you would like to accomplish by talking nonsense such as that. You have to be careful when you become eager for the answer. While trying to find out the answer, you may fail to notice a lot of other things occurring around you. You not only become blind but grow into cruel as well. Once you believe that the end justifies means, you are going to feel the presence of Oni the cold-blooded Japanese devil inside you.
The life of my wife is now drawing to a close. We don’t have much time left to sort out our past. We cannot afford to listen to your story even if there were a certain truth in it.
Please do not disturb the peace of this house. We suffered enough already. And I am afraid if it would be quite unkind of me to say this to your face, to a girl of sixteen, but, unfortunately, my wife has pestered me to tell you that she wants you to neither visit us nor call us from now on. I am sorry that I had to address this to you in person.
*
Based on my personal experience with my grandfather, I have been well aware that the elderly tend to talk long. But Yukio’s grandfather seemed to establish a new Japanese record that night.
Yurei
Once in a while a fog emerges from Tokyo Bay without warning. A dense fog. It arises stealthily from the surface of the sea at night. And the dark sea reminds me of the undulating black hair of a woman I had seen several times in my dream some time ago. It was an eerie dream and it always felt dreadful because I knew myself that I would never be able to identify who the woman was.
A Japanese Schoolgirl Page 11