Nan-Core

by Mahokaru Numata

  Her eyes went wide; it was hard to make out where her eyeliner ended and her eyelids began. “Eww. Don’t be gross, I don’t masturbate.”

  “Cutting’s just a variation of getting yourself off.”

  I was still trying to get her to eat more, little by little, thinking she might lose interest in cutting herself if her diet improved. I had made potato salads, noodle dishes, and omelettes after the rice ball meal. I was making progress, but she still couldn’t stop herself. There were fresh bloodstains on her bandages that day. I decided she might break the habit if I convinced her there was nothing cool about it, that it was as debased an action as touching herself.

  At the same time, I became obsessed with thinking about how to end her life. It was on my mind whether I was with her or alone. When I imagined doing it, I would get so excited my skin sometimes broke out in goosebumps. The desire existed alongside the wish for Mitsuko to stop cutting herself, without any sense of contradiction.

  I realize that was strange, in hindsight.

  Being told she was essentially masturbating seemed to get to her. She didn’t stop cutting herself; instead she became increasingly depressed, doing it less often but making what seemed to be deeper wounds when she did.

  One day, an idea came to me while I was in her room.

  “Hey, could you try cutting me?” I asked.

  “You … What? Don’t say such weird shit out of nowhere.” The trembling in her voice told me she was deeply afraid.

  “If you do it to me, it’s not masturbation.”

  “I don’t want to cut anyone else. I feel sick just thinking about it.”

  “Well, how about you show me the blades you always use. There’s nothing wrong with looking. Come on, go and get them.”

  Although Mitsuko typically acted high and mighty, she was a marionette if I gave forceful orders. I got her to line the blades and everything else she used on the surface of the table. Then I sat down and faced her.

  “I want you to show me how you do it.”

  She picked up one of the blades and stared at it.

  “Look, it’s okay. Just do it like you normally would.”

  There were a number of cutting blades, sanitary pads, plastic bags, bandages, and tape lined up on the table. Mitsuko, a vacant look on her face, pushed her scar-covered left hand into a plastic bag, then positioned a blade held in her right hand over her left wrist. Her sad eyes never left mine even as I nodded and she jerked the blade quickly to one side, leaving behind a red line. The cut was shallow enough that there was no blood. The transparent bag clouded slightly from the warmth of her perspiration.

  “That looks easy enough. Can I touch it?”

  I brushed the tip of my index finger across the new incision, and also traced the browned welts of her older cuts.

  “Perhaps I could try doing it for you. So we can see how that feels.”

  She didn’t seem to have any particular objections so I held her wrist steady and drew another red line, parallel to the one she had just made. I had to hold back a rising thrill as I leaned in closer, seeing a dewy, transparent liquid in the base wound from below before the blood started to seep in.

  I held out my left hand.

  “I want you to cut me, to mark our friendship.”

  Mitsuko was motionless for something like three minutes, neither of us saying a thing. Then she bent forwards and swept over my arm. It was over in an instant, leaving a moment before the gentle ache of pain. We faced each other as we held out our arms, both cut now, so they were above the table. Thin lines of blood trickled downwards from each of the new incisions. My hope was that through cutting me, by cutting somebody else, Mitsuko’s urges might change direction and move away from herself.

  She jumped up like she’d snapped out of a daze, then dressed her arm with practiced speed before applying one of the pads to my wrist and finally wrapping it with a bandage. Halfway through the process she started to cry. The tears didn’t stop and after a while she left me and shut herself up in the bedroom.

  When I went to check on her a while later she was fast asleep, her face muddled like an artist’s palette from tears.

  That night, I had only walked a short distance of the way back from Mitsuko’s place when I bumped into Ramen. I wasn’t particularly surprised, since he was always hanging around with the hope of snaring Mitsuko. And since he delivered food for a living, he’d be used to finding out where people lived.

  “Huh, that’s odd. Ghost Girl not with you?” Mitsuko usually accompanied me back to the station. “You’re all alone? I’ll take you home if you like, missy. Where d’ya live?”

  Ramen was dressed in a blue turtleneck sweater, in place of the white broth-stained overalls he always wore for work. The heady rush of excitement I’d felt when I cut Mitsuko’s wrist was still there, whizzing inside me with no outlet in sight.

  “Really? You’d take me home?”

  He looked surprised—it was the first time I’d spoken a word to him.

  “Sure, no problem.” He was clearly struggling to feign a sullen face in order to hide his delight. I turned around and started to walk away from the station. “Huh? Taking the long way around? So, honey, what’s your name? Ah, you can call me Joe.”

  “I’m Mitsuko.”

  “So did you guess, Mitsuko? It was you I liked all along, not Ghost Girl. Cross my heart.”

  Mitsuko’s apartment was halfway up a small hill. Going downhill led to the main street and the station, but the way up was an endless stretch of sleepy residential areas. I meandered from corner to corner, making my way upward. Ramen was following behind and whistling in an act of forced nonchalance, but he was starting to get impatient.

  “Hey Mitsuko, how far are we going here? It’s getting late, so let’s hurry back to your place,” he said.

  We had at some point reached the top and were already walking downhill when Ramen opened his mouth to protest again. That was when I finally caught sight of what I’d been looking for.

  Stairs.

  I walked to them and stopped, pressing my hands to my knees.

  “Mitsuko, are you okay?” Ramen walked over and looked into my face. He still smelled of ramen, even in his blue sweater.

  “Just a cramp, in my leg. Can you give me a piggyback ride to the bottom?”

  “Carry you? Seriously?”

  “Right. I guess you need muscles to …”

  “I’ve got muscles. Okay, sure, I’ll carry you. Come on then.”

  The moment Ramen turned and crouched, I kicked him in the lower back, sending him flying.

  His mouth slammed into the steps before he could scream, so the only sound was a choked-off groan. Ramen’s body flipped over as it pitched down the steps, finally coming to rest on a landing.

  For some reason I didn’t feel any of the usual elation, no Nan-Core. My heart was racing madly, but it was nothing more than a routine and purely physical response to what had just happened.

  After checking that no one else was around, I walked down the steps and stopped next to him. It was hard to tell if he was still breathing. I lugged his heavy body to the edge of the landing, trying not to look at his acne-covered face, then gathered my strength and kicked him again, sending him down the last half of the steps.

  I didn’t bother to check on him after that. I climbed back up to the street, feeling cheated somehow as I set off in the general direction of the train station.

  Sometime later, I told Mitsuko what had happened when she commented on not having seen Ramen for a while.

  “What? Oh, the poor bastard. Did he really die?”

  “I didn’t check, but …”

  “I wonder if it was in the papers.”

  “Dunno.”

  “No one will find out?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  A couple of days after that I got Mitsuko to cut my wrist again, twice this time, still hoping she would stop doing it to herself if she got a taste of what it was like to cut other people. B
ut she much preferred it when I cut her, not the other way around. Whenever she cut me she always begged me to do the same for her.

  “It’s wonderful.” After cutting each other she would stretch out her arm, trickling with blood, and shut her eyes in delight.

  “If it feels so good I promise I’ll do it on your birthday, once a year. But please stop cutting yourself.”

  “I couldn’t wait for a whole year.”

  “You can’t know that unless you try.”

  “Let’s get away from this place, go somewhere together. We could live normal lives, I know it, we just need to be someplace new, somewhere far away.”

  “Going far away won’t change anything.”

  “We could go north, where everything’s white with snow in the winter. We could go all the way to Hokkaido. It’d be like living in a foreign country.”

  “Okay, Mitsuko, if you’re serious, could you promise not to cut yourself for at least two months? Starting today.”

  “Yeah, I can do that. Two months is fine, absolutely.”

  Needless to say, I had no intention of following Mitsuko to Hokkaido. Even so, I bought a tourist map of the island and joined her in gazing at the photos of a place that transformed anew with each turn of the seasons. If Mitsuko somehow lasted the two months, my plan was to think up an excuse to add another, then another. I thought there was hope. Her diet was improving gradually, and she was now able to eat most things except meat or fish.

  We would rent an apartment in Hakodate and work as waitresses, or as assistants at a florist. I would cook and Mitsuko would do the cleaning. When we had enough money saved we would open a small business that was part cafe, part flower shop. The customers in our cafe would drink coffee and eat cakes, the air smelling of flowers as they looked around and debated which blooms to buy.

  We discussed such things tirelessly as the days passed uneventfully and the season transitioned from winter to spring. Mitsuko laughed a lot, and I think she even put on a little weight. She was eagerness personified when she invited me to come with her to Hakodate and scout things out, saying she would pay for the trip. I always found travel to be tedious, but with things as they were it felt like I had no choice but to go. I supposed July would be best if we were to go, so I decided to try every trick in the book to stretch out the two-month period she had originally agreed to.

  Early in the final week of those initial two months, Mitsuko was walking by my side when suddenly she collapsed in the middle of the street and lost consciousness.

  She hadn’t seemed any different from usual, but on closer inspection I saw blood dripping from the cuff of her blouse. A crowd had gathered so there was nothing I could do, and before I knew it we were both in an ambulance that someone had called. The doctor told me she had cut herself at the wrist and inside her elbow, that the cuts had been quite deep, and that it looked like Mitsuko had attempted to stitch the one at her elbow with a needle and thread.

  After some time a woman turned up claiming to be Mitsuko’s mother. She was dressed in a flawlessly draped pearl-white kimono and gave me a scathing glare as she looked me up and down. I walked out of the hospital.

  When I visited Mitsuko’s apartment a few days later I found her back in her own bed, already having been discharged.

  “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t do it.”

  I was stunned into silence at the fact that she didn’t have a trace of makeup on. I could never have imagined how she looked without it. All her features were there, but she looked fragile, like an infant born prematurely. Or like Nana, the aging doll I’d dispatched into the river. Her skin was clammy and bloated, probably from crying herself to sleep over and over again. And it wasn’t just her face. Her ears, the body beneath the sheets—it was as though her entire frame had shrunk a full size.

  “Mitsuko, why couldn’t you keep our promise?”

  “I’m a mess, you know that.”

  “Didn’t we have plans to go to Hakodate together?”

  “I couldn’t stop myself, not for that long.”

  “Okay. Let’s start over.”

  “I can’t anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I love cutting myself.”

  Mitsuko avoided looking me in the eye the entire time. Her eyes filled with tears again, as one drop and then another soaked into her pillow.

  “You love it? Okay, how exactly?” I asked, keeping my voice as gentle as I could.

  Her mysterious, unworldly face showed effort as she searched with all her might for the right words. “It’s like … If I don’t cut, all these things just … I don’t, I don’t know.” Her high-pitched, child-like voice cut off mid-sentence and she fell silent for a long while. “When I cut myself … In that moment when I’m cutting myself, just for that one moment, it’s like everything … everything … evvvrything is so …”

  She couldn’t seem to find the words that followed, no matter how hard she tried. The corners of her mouth were trembling violently. At long last, she closed her eyes in defeat and began to sob weakly.

  I knew what it was that she had been unable to describe. I knew, more specifically, that it was something for which there were no words, that it was because of this I had resorted to calling it Nan-Core, strange as the name was.

  “Okay. I won’t try to stop you anymore. Cutting is very important to you, I see that now.”

  In all honesty I think I had known it from the beginning. It was just that some part of me didn’t like her methods, her resorting to cutting herself. I had wanted to stop her from doing it that way.

  “We can’t go to Hakodate now,” she said. “It was too good to be true anyway.”

  “We can. We can go when you’re better.”

  “I don’t want to move anymore.”

  I remained silent.

  She spoke again. “I don’t want to eat anymore. I don’t want to leave this bed.”

  “Do you want to cut now?” She gave a very slight nod. “Do you want me to do it, like before?” Another nod, almost imperceptible. I asked where she kept the supplies then went to fetch them, leaving her side for a moment. “Hey, Mitsuko. We should still go somewhere together, you know. We could go even farther than Hakodate, farther than Hokkaido. Let’s go to another country. Some town we’ve never even heard of, one day, just the two of us.”

  As I spoke I placed the plastic bag over her left arm. I used the bag because I wanted to do it her way.

  I was certain she understood what was about to happen.

  “And in some faraway town, our own little cafe—”

  “That’s right,” I chimed in. “A nice little cafe where you can drink coffee surrounded by the smell of flowers.”

  I wanted it to be over in one go, so I took the blade and made a long, deep incision, as though I was cleaving her arm in two.

  “All the cups, plates, and sugar bowls will be white,” she said.

  “Yes. That will make the surrounding flowers stand out.”

  “There’s a cowbell ringing at the door, and the happy voices of customers chatting.”

  “I’m baking cakes and Mitsuko, you’re arranging bouquets, so many bouquets. Just how the customers want them.”

  “And not just roses or carnations …”

  “Baby’s breath, buttercups, flowers gathered from fields, flowers we don’t even know the names of.”

  The bag was heavy quickly, the blood spurting out with more force than I’d anticipated.

  “Ahh, it’s wonderful …”

  Neither of us spoke further. A bystander would only have seen us looking at each other in silence, but we were in fact caught up together inside a blissful clarity. The nape of my neck where I’d had the lump as a child hardened, throbbing like a powerful drum.

  Mitsuko and I were failed people. We were like ugly catfish, living on the bottom of a stagnant swamp. But in moments like this even catfish, ignorant of why they are born that way, manage to float to the water’s surface to breathe in clean air an
d, in the light of the sun, witness the world as it is meant to be seen. Only during such moments were we able to be as normal people.

  The afterimage of the world I saw with Mitsuko that day has been burned into my mind. I have no doubt that it will stay with me until the day I die.

  Blood spilled from the bag, soaking into the carpet. At some point Mitsuko closed her eyes and drowsed off, but I remained transfixed until the moment that she was truly gone.

  That was where the second notebook ended, even though there were plenty of blank pages towards the back. Even if it hadn’t stopped there I doubted I could have continued reading.

  Still leaning against the window I gasped for air like a man nearly drowned. A thin film of oily sweat clung to the roots of my hair, face, and back. I couldn’t tell myself it was fiction, not anymore. Each line of text conveyed a vividness of the sort that only truth could impart.

  Mom, then. Could Mom really have written this?

  I had tussled with that question in some corner of my mind the whole time I was reading. Aside from Dad, there was no one else to consider. And hadn’t Yohei said it himself? That writing something like that was definitely possible for her?

  I covered my face with my hands and pressed my temples hard. I’d run out of energy and couldn’t think properly. But I still felt the need to get the facts straight and make sense of it all.

  The view outside the window was the same as always. It was a bright, early-summer Sunday. The hydrangeas were in full bloom in the neighbor’s garden.

  What did it mean if Mom was a murderer?

  Had she killed and replaced my real mother?

  Was that bundle of hair from my murdered mother?

  If so, why was the name Misako, Mom’s name, on the paper it was wrapped in?

  Had Mom been holding the pillow at my bedside because she’d meant to kill me, too?

  What about the fear on her face that time she was shuffling along in Dad’s sandals like a sleepwalker?

  Had her death really been an accident? Could it possibly have been suicide, repentance for her crimes?

  Or had Dad killed her, having discovered what she had done?