Yet that sense of wrongness was deep-rooted, like something that went beyond simple reasoning. And even when the casual dismissal of the adults had begun to convince me that maybe they were right, that maybe she was Mom after all, all the while the sense of something being out of place continued to throb, like a milk tooth that was loose but wouldn’t quite come out.
I had a hard time calling her “Mom,” this person that should have been my mother. There was nothing different about the way she acted around me. She would hug me tenderly when I wanted her to, and throw a fit when I did something very bad. I still couldn’t call her “Mom,” but it didn’t take long to grow attached, either.
I have a few fragmented memories from that time. One time, my mother took me to a bookstore and found a picture book which she bought for me. It was one of my favorites before I was admitted to the hospital—the story was about a terrifying, man-eating dragon—but it had burned in the fire along with my other books and toys. She called out in surprise and picked up the book with an air of nostalgia and smiled at me, and I happily noted a sudden surge in the conviction that she might really be my mother after all. When I got home I was disappointed to page through the book and find that the man-eating dragon that had been so terrifying to look at before was actually not scary at all. If anything, it looked comical. When I told as much to my mother she patted me on the head and said, “You poor thing, Ryo. All sorts of things must seem different to you now after being in hospital for so long and putting up with so many ouchie needles.”
Another time, my mother licked free some grit that had got stuck in my eye. She assured me it would be fine and, although my eyelid was jammed shut from the pain, it relaxed naturally when she placed her tongue over it. I remember the sensation even now, of her tongue being neither hot nor cold, just soft. She took my head in her hands and directly licked my eyeball with her tongue. The relief stopped my tears, and I remembered then how she had used the same technique to clean dirt from my eyes when I had been smaller. When she was done I asked her how it tasted and she said, “Ryo, your tears are very salty.”
I wondered what else I could have done, during those days filled with such tiny moments.
At some point—at least, this is what seems likely—the discomfort I felt towards my mother came to be replaced by guilt for still feeling that way. And you don’t need much effort to forget guilt, especially when you’re a child. By the time my brother Yohei was born a year later, I had completely forgotten about the doubts I had had regarding my mother. Back then her hair had been black and glossy, without as much as a single strand of white …
I let my eyes fall once more to the handbag still in my hands.
A vague image floated to mind: a woman in a sleeveless dress printed with large flowers, and this handbag resting on her arm. I couldn’t decide whether the image was of my mother before she was replaced or simply a fictitious picture that I had invented.
I didn’t even know whether it was true or not that she had been replaced.
I sat cross-legged on the tatami flooring, lost for a while in a daze. Eventually I pulled myself together and dug further into the box I’d pulled the handbag from. It wasn’t clear if it had been there from the outset, or if Dad had pulled something else out to hide it, but right at the bottom I found a manila envelope stuffed with papers of some sort, or documents. I opened it to find a collection of notebooks. There were four in total, each a different thickness and design. Each had a number written in the bottom-right corner of the cover, one through four.
I chose one and flipped through it. The pages were crammed full of text, leaving hardly any blank spaces. The sentences were written in heavy pencil, with occasional scuffs where an eraser had been used. The characters were artlessly scrawled across the page, but there was no way to tell if the style was put on or just the author’s natural hand.
I took out the notepad marked One and began to read. Nan-Core was written in as the title. I didn’t know what it meant. My hand was throwing shadows onto the page so I moved closer to the window. Before long the text sucked me in, and I forgot everything else around me.
2
Nan-Core
Is it an abnormality in my brain structure that allows people like me to kill so easily?
I heard that there is a complex interaction between the many hormones in the brain, that even a small change in that balance can have a large effect on mood and personality. That was when the idea occurred to me that, if medical research in the field continued to progress, perhaps there might one day be a drug that could cure the urge to kill.
If a medicine like that existed, I think I would try taking it.
I kill people because I want to. I’ve never felt anything like guilt. But if something came along that was able to stop me from doing it I think I’d try it regardless. I don’t know why. It’s strange, even to me.
I don’t know where to start. Maybe the warning signs, the trigger that made me the way I am … I hope I’ll be able to explain them properly. When I was around four or five, my mother began taking me on regular visits to the hospital. The doctor would always press his fingers over the small lump on the back of my head, then he would take out picture cards and watch as he slowly repeated words like “apple, apple, apple.” It was only much later that I realized he had wanted me to say “apple,” too. I don’t know if it was somehow related to the lump on my head, but while I could more or less understand what people were saying to me, back then I never tried to say anything in response.
My examination was always over quickly, but once it was done my mother would spend a long time talking to the doctor about what I was like at home. The bespectacled doctor always spoke in a hushed tone. My mother would talk, sometimes through tears, and he would listen and nod patiently, rejoindering with a muttered explanation when necessary.
One of the things he said quite often in an apologetic tone was something like, “Your child doesn’t have … Nan-Core, so I’m afraid it can’t be helped.” The “…” part of his explanation would sometimes change and I don’t remember all the variations, but his point was that there were many types of Nan-Core and that I had none of them.
Other times the doctor would say things like, “Not having Nan-Core is a big problem,” or “It’d be great if we could find a suitable type of Nan-Core for your child.” I was just a kid, but it felt unfair all the same. Why did I have to be missing something everyone else had? There was always a vague thought in my mind that I somehow had to get myself a Nan-Core.
On our way back from the hospital my mother would take me to various places on her errands, and this would cause me unbearable pain. I was used to the hospital, but each time I went somewhere for the first time it felt like all the new things were stabbing me with a mass of invisible thorns.
The place I felt most relaxed was in my room at home, wedged into the gap between my bed and the wall. I would sleep there each time I had a fit, and my mother would bring my food up to me.
One day after an examination, my mother took me to a bargain hall inside a department store. Immediately the hustle and bustle, the colors and smells bore down on me. I followed in silence wherever she led me by the hand, and I don’t think she or anyone else could have realized that I was completely terrified and had almost wet myself (I had in fact wet myself a few times before). If my doctor had touched the lump at the back of my head during times like this, I think that instead of finding it soft as usual he would have found it swollen and hard.
At first my mother kept a tight grip on my hand, then she let go for a moment to spread out some clothes she had picked from the mountain of items on special sale and from then onwards kept taking my hand then letting go again. After she did this a few times I stole away and left the jam-packed bargain hall behind me.
Along the wall past the escalators was an area with only a few people milling about among displays of upright clocks, vases, and various metal fixtures whose uses I couldn’t begin to understand. Looking
back now I suppose it was an antique fair.
I walked closer and immediately noticed a small girl inside one of the glass showcases. She was blond and staring at me with a look that was something like surprise or resignation. In the moment our eyes met all the floods of color and attacking noises were washed away by silence, as if by magic. I knew then and there that she was my Nan-Core. It was there, in such a place. Something I had never expected to find.
I knew it was going to be okay.
After a while my mother came looking for me. I had camped down in front of the showcase and wouldn’t budge even when she pulled my hand.
“What? You want a doll?” mother asked. I think she was surprised, because that was the first time I’d ever refused to listen or acted like I wanted something. She eyed the price tag and muttered to the seller about how it looked old and worn, seemingly unconvinced as she considered it, but she ended up buying Nana (as I was already calling her in my mind; the name felt natural) for me. Perhaps she bought the doll because the doctor had told her each time we visited the hospital that the best thing was to let me do what I wanted.
As an aside: When my mother was pregnant with me she once slipped getting onto the bus and fell, hitting her abdomen hard on the edge of one of the steps. As a result, she was convinced it was her fault that I didn’t speak.
The package that came with Nana contained a few different outfits and a miniature baby bottle. Nana was an old resin doll, designed to drink milk. Her eyelashes were long and grouped in bunches, planted around blue eyes that clicked shut when she lay flat. Her tiny lips were painted with red enamel and had a short round tube for drinking milk embedded in the center. I couldn’t help but think the tube made her expression look a little startled, like she was caught in the moment before a scream.
When we got home, and as soon as it was just Nana and me in the space between the bed and the wall, I just had to pry off her frilly clothes, made of dark red velvet, and pull down her rough cotton underwear to see below. Her underbelly was gently swollen and had the same thin tube as the one in her mouth sticking through the middle. It felt incredibly lewd. Not that I understood such concepts at the time, of course. I brought my face up to the pipe and peered into her, but the only thing I could make out through the narrow opening was a gloomy darkness.
Even so I knew that, at her core, Nana was my Nan-Core.
That I was saved.
I played with her every day. I remember all the details vividly, like something from a morbid dream. I would stand her up, naked, as I used the baby bottle to pour water through the tube in her mouth. Her eyes would stay wide open as the liquid dripped from her underbelly, and the whole time she maintained a befuddled expression. After this I would turn her rosy, chubby figure upside down. Her legs would spin down from the crotch and catch at an impossible angle, fully exposing the tiny secret between them. The end of the tube inside her protruded a bit at the end. I would carefully attach the bottle to this, and pour more water in.
I was Nana. I was an empty vessel. I was unable to close off the pipe that was open inside me. I had no means to stop the things that flowed into or out of me. Nana’s fears were my own, and my fears were hers. When upside down, her eyes would clamp shut as the water flowed relentlessly, out from her little bird-like mouth, soaking her hair.
My mother watched me with a discomfited look as I did little besides play with the doll. But I never got bored. The doll’s blond hair was always soaking wet. Eventually, after a while of repeating the game over and over, I sensed a small change occurring within me. It felt as though I was gradually building up an immunity against both the outside world and myself.
I realized I probably wouldn’t fall to pieces if I spoke a little.
Despite my mother’s misgivings, I was admitted to regular classes in elementary school. I had learned to give simple, short verbal responses barely moving my lips at all. The lump at the nape of my neck no longer stood out.
Even so, I still went through my days feeling like half my brain was unconscious. I stared vacantly with wide-open eyes as I took in the world around me. I was still just like Nana. I can see it even now. Since I could first remember, I had always lived with my own peculiar sense of discomfort. It’s hard to put into words. The feeling was like licking sandpaper or wearing a terribly itchy, wooly sweater on bare skin … I don’t know. Everything around me was frizzled and sharp-edged, hostile in some unidentifiable way.
Amongst all this the adults were the most overpowering. Their physical size, their smells, their words, facial expressions, the way they laughed—it all pressed down on me with particular force. My classmates seemed distant and incomprehensible, too, in the way they would chat so effortlessly with these terrifying grown-ups.
When I was in second grade there was a girl in my class called Michiru, and she was really bright. She was pretty and from a well-off home; she was the Queen Bee, the sort found in every classroom.
I don’t know why, but she alone became very special to me.
The kids from our class always used to go over to her house to play. Michiru’s inner circle was made up of the same three girls, and beyond that was a group of hangers-on of about a dozen girls and boys.
I could only watch on from the periphery, of course, but Michiru was magnanimous enough not to mind when I mixed in and tagged along with the others to her house. Even better, when our eyes met every now and again, she would go so far as to flash a smile or give me a nod.
Although they weren’t quite the same as Nana’s, Michiru had wonderfully long eyelashes. Her house had once belonged to the old village headman and the old-fashioned, single-story wooden structure was surrounded by a large, tree-filled garden. There was a pond ringed with stones beside which stood a wisteria trellis, under which was a ceramic table surrounded by several stools. That area formed the mainstay for games of make-believe or hide and seek. When Michiru and the three girls of her entourage sat there a couple of the stools would still be free, and there were always small fights over who would join them.
I never considered sitting there myself. I was never given a role to play during make-believe games and no one tried to find me when we played hide and seek. But no one really bullied me either. I didn’t feel much of anything either way.
One day when the others were passing around comics I was crouched a short distance away, watching a snail that had attached itself to an azalea leaf. The snails in the expansive grounds of Michiru’s large home were big enough to be creepy, almost as fat as a loquat fruit. Next to me was an old, abandoned well, plugged with a round, wooden lid. I found a small gap where part of the rim had rotted away, just small enough that a clenched fist wouldn’t fit through. I was afraid something like a snake might crawl out, but I couldn’t resist the urge to get in closer and take a peek. I felt a compulsion to look. It was as if the gap had found me and not the other way around.
I stepped closer and a musty, dark scent wafted up. I sucked in the dank smell on an inhalation. The moment I pressed my face to the gap, darkness clung to my eyes. I couldn’t tell where my eyes ended and the dark began. It was just endlessly, totally dark.
I forgot I was in a garden in the middle of the day. There were beads of sweat on my back.
“Death.” I don’t remember if the word actually came into my head right then, but it was apparent to me that the darkness stretching out into the depths of that well was boundless compared to the bright outside world.
I felt like I would be sucked in headfirst if I didn’t do something. I doubted anyone would notice if I went missing. I finally managed to peel my face away and rushed over to where I had been watching the snail. It was gross but I made myself pull at the shell until the creature came off the leaf and rolled into my palm.
I dropped the snail through the gap.
Without a sound the whirlpool-patterned shell and its contents were immediately swallowed by the darkness. It was as though it had become a part of the abyss.
I felt a
little calmer. Because, for that day at least, I felt that I had managed to avoid being sucked through the hole.
From that day onwards, it became my secret task to drop bugs through the hole whenever I went to Michiru’s place. It felt like a duty I was obliged to perform, or even a mission from God (all children have a part of them that instinctively believes in such things). Snails were easy to catch, but it didn’t really matter what I used. Earwigs, worms, even cicada that were too weak to move. When everyone else was raising hell playing statues, I would be off to the side, crawling through the garden searching for tiny creatures.
The more I dropped into the darkness, the more addicted I became, a slave to the mysterious delight the act elicited. Kindness welled up inside me, and even though I really knew that dropping the bugs down the hole meant they would die, it felt rather like I was helping the snails and worms get back to where they belonged. Because there was nothing glaring or sharp in the dark world beyond the hole, only silence.
I felt a peace of mind, knowing I was doing something that needed to be done. All I had to do was send through enough lives, and a safe balance could be maintained.
It was the first time I had started something of my own accord, with a clear sense of purpose. I also felt a strong sense of superiority over the other kids, who were ignorant, lost in child-like games.
I was in the garden as usual one day—the wisteria petals had fallen to the ground around the trellis, so I think it was early summer—when suddenly the sky turned dark and it began to drizzle. Michiru suggested that everyone go indoors for some snacks, but I didn’t budge from the garden even as everyone else raised a clamor as they headed to the house. For some reason I had yet to catch a single bug that day and hadn’t sent a single offering through the hole. It had never happened before and I was worried that something bad would happen if I didn’t fix the situation quickly.
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