At this, the gothic Lolita opens her school bag. She extracts a metal tool, inches from Ichiro’s face. The man’s fingers are still groping inside her when the shojo, with a skilful movement, places the tool on the molesting organ, curls her finger and squeezes. When Ichiro hears the clack it’s too late to do anything. What would I do? The man’s scream is shrill and womanish. The staples fired from that particular model of staple gun are almost half an inch long.
Ichiro leaps to his feet. Panic closes his throat; he can’t breathe. He can feel the pain of the staple pass through the light fabric of his trousers and pierce his hardened sex. He leaves the train, cradling his genitals, protecting them for as long as it takes to get away. This is not his stop. But then he had no intention of going in to the office in any case. Not today. And definitely not now. By Friday! He forces himself to breathe deeply. There’s not much time left to make his preparations. Tokyo Hands is where he must start.
*
The big department store is almost empty at this hour of the morning. Ichiro follows the signs up to the third floor. They have almost anything you might want there. The shelves go on and on, offering all that the human imagination has managed to come up with, from the Stone Age on. The music pounds out the same deafening notes over and over again, in contrast to the childish voice of the female singer: Everyone says, girls are so pretty when they’re in love. Is it true? How I want it to be. Even the shy one, even the ugly one, when she’s in love her eyes shine like stars. Mamemimumeno, mamemimumeno! Ichiro’s hearing is very sensitive and this music bothers him. He tries to tune it out, tightening his jaw, making his ears buzz. But his phone is vibrating now. He counts four rings and answers. His colleague’s voice is so frantic that he holds the phone away from his ear.
“Where are you? Did you forget our morning meeting with the boss? It’s not like you, Ichiro. An empty desk, at 11 a.m.”
“I had an idea, for the Sony campaign. I’ll write it up and send it to you.”
“Send it to me? You have to come in to the office now, Ichiro.”
“Can I help you, sir?”
Ichiro ends the call and turns to the clerk. “I need some... knives, please.”
He follows the young man through the department, his eyes glued to the roll of fat that hangs over the clerk’s waistband, along with the top of his pants. American food every day, Ichiro thinks. He used to have a roll like that. But it wasn’t the Big Macs. After his mother died, Ichiro lost all the fat that once blanketed his body. When did she die? He can’t seem to make time into something tangible. It’s a sequence of images. Sometimes long, sometimes short.
The young man is pointing to a wall of steel blades. Twelve horizontal rows by nine vertical ones. One hundred and eight knives, arranged by their five different sizes. Ichiro runs a finger over the blade of the one the clerk hands him, and shudders. It would slice through a two-hundred-foot-plus tentacle of a cephalopod as though it were a piece of sushi.
“...Unless you’re interested in ceramic knives?”
“No, steel is fine. I’ll take five – the biggest ones.”
The young man nods and takes down the knives, leaving a gap on the wall. The pause between two notes. The empty space full of feeling.
“Anything else, sir?”
“Yes – security systems.”
The clerk sniggers, snorting and making a barking sound like a seal. “A bakemono attack?”
Ichiro scratches his head. He doesn’t know how, but it seems this guy has guessed the truth. He imagines the burglars, like colossal lizards and squid fed by nerve gas and atomic nuclei, surprised by the concierge. Sea monsters determined to break into his flat and steal the only thing of value there besides the cello. He says, “It’s a premeditated crime.”
“Oh...” The clerk pulls his trousers up over the roll of fat and underpants. “Come with me.” And he darts between the shelves. Ichiro has to quicken his pace to keep up with him, and to hear what he’s saying. “You want a system that prevents false alarms – even if the cat is in the house. Simple to install, effective, not too expensive, easy to maintain and above all easy to use.”
Ichiro nods in agreement. To tell the truth, he has no idea what he wants.
“You want a practical system, wireless. A set-up that will signal the approach from well outside the area. To give you time to prepare yourself.” The clerk waves at the shopping cart with the knives and winks, conspiratorially. “You have to use your wits if you want to win the battle. You have to be creative with these devices...”
At last he comes to a halt. They are in the security systems department. Outdoor surveillance cameras, hallway monitors, sensors, antitheft smoke bombs and fog dischargers, directional microphones, fibre optics, access control...
“...you have to focus on the deterrent level of the system, create simulated presence, obstacles and other automated functions that are designed to scare the intruder away.”
“Is there something that connects to the police via satellite?”
The clerk snorts like a seal again. Through the choking sounds, he keeps talking. “The police, sure, but when will they turn up? And what will they do when they get there?”
When Ichiro goes down to the first floor, his cart is full of stuff. He moves his lips almost imperceptibly, totting up the bill. But then he stops in front of the wig counter. The wigs come in all different colours and lengths. He reaches out and, casually, picks up a red one, with long, waist-length curls. A few feet before the checkout counter he grabs a pair of fluorescent pink fishnet stockings, and eye shadow of the same colour. The last thing he picks up are false eyelashes, purple as irises.
*
Eve is the main character. The rising star. All it takes is a wave, the press of a button and her reputation begins to grow; she gathers consensus. Everything is set. There is no margin for error. In a few months, Eve will be every man’s fantasy, every woman’s ideal; she’ll be in the girls’ latest styles and between the sheets of every teenage boy.
She has a strange, dangerous air – it’s her role. Even when her personalities multiply as a function of the number of her spokespeople. Her round face, sickly pale, narrows below prominent cheekbones towards her little, heart-shaped mouth. But it expresses neither sadness, anger nor joy. It’s a transparent face, a mirror that reflects the emotions of those who gaze at her. Like Buddha, Eve is love, death, beauty, all at the same time. She must help those who play with her, those who treat her like an object, and help discover what lies in their souls. A ningyo, bound to cause catastrophes before saving Japan from destruction.
The video game in which Eve is the main character will be released at Christmas. At least, for those who are concerned with her virtual being. What is already alive, however, is crafted from choice morsels. Her limbs are articulated around spherical balls, her ligaments are made of rubber; the vagina is made of Liquid Silicone Rubber, interchangeable and washable. Her pale colour comes from powdered shells; her teeth are ceramic, her eyes are plucked from a stuffed cat. The product of more than twelve months of work from Nobuyuki Kodama’s team at Orient Industry, Eve embodies perfection – a flesh and bone manga heroine.
“She’s a promotional creature,” Fuco Shima mutters, as he tucks his shirt into his trousers, tosses his passport and wallet onto the tatami mat. “They gave her to me hoping I’d fall in love, because they wanted me to write about her. She’s worth five million yen.”
*
Fuco Shima suffers from Paris syndrome. Ichiro himself has never had the travel bug. Travel is dangerous. The unpredictable reigns. When his commands from the virtual world in which he’s used to living have no effect beyond the walls of his house, he has panic attacks; “outside of Japan” is something he has never even considered. There was a time, though, when Fuco Shima had a thirst for adventure. Though he too belongs to the culture of otaku, and grew up around manga and avatars, though he writes articles on video games, up until two years ago he was drawn to the real.
More precisely, he was drawn to Paris.
What does Paris represent for a Japanese man? It’s the question that underlies all Fuco Shima’s troubles, which are many. He displays an impressive number of psychiatric symptoms: feelings of sharp disappointment, hallucinations, a persecution complex, depersonalisation disorder, anguish and the loss of a sense of reality (ironically, a warning of the danger of being around him, Ichiro thinks). And then there are the psychosomatic illnesses: tachycardia, excessive sweating, vertigo... Ever since he came home, two years ago, Fuco Shima has been a shadow of a soul.
What happened to him in Paris? Another pertinent question. But all that Ichiro can get out of his neighbour at 17G are confused answers, which clearly make their rare conversations a source of palpable agony. Fuco Shima flushes and begins to tremble. Especially when he speaks of a certain French taxi driver, who, if you can believe it, told him to “bouge ta merde” before crushing his computer bag under a Pirelli tyre. As far as Ichiro can make out, Fuco Shima had felt like the victim of some prejudice – against the Japanese? Against Asians? Or for some other, more personal, reason? But it wasn’t only that. The real insult, which manifests even now in trembling and in childish behaviour, appears to have been the general French attitude of aggression and hostility. Paranoia, for sure. And it’s the same with this story of the boulevards around the Bastille being blocked by tractors full of angry peasants. According to Fuco Shima, when he tried to decipher the words on the side of one of these vehicles, they had bombarded him with lumps of manure. He read, This tractor belongs to my bank. Too late: for the next hour he stank of manure and the men mocked him. But Ichiro is suspicious of these stories, twisted as they are by Fuco Shima’s illness. Paris, as everyone knows, is one of the most refined cities in the world.
After two years of nightmares and hallucinations, Fuco Shima’s psycho-analyst decided to combat Fuco Shima’s misery with something even worse. He reminded him that his case was not an isolated one, and that he had no excuse: twenty victims a year, out of the six million Japanese who go to Paris. Fuco Shima’s last hope, given the gravity of his case, will be to relive his trauma. He must arrange a trip to Paris, as quickly as possible, no time to waste, without any planning whatsoever.
He didn’t take it well. The first few days, he couldn’t write a word, let alone write the article for the video game magazine he worked for. Even playing seemed impossible. He stayed in his apartment, in the dark, barely moving.
And then one morning, a few days later, he rang Ichiro’s doorbell. He was shaking like an electric muscle stimulator, pale but determined. He said, “I’m ready to go back.”
And then he entrusted Eve to Ichiro.
*
Ichiro sits cross-legged on the tatami in his living room, surrounded by remote controls and pieces of alarm clocks, microphones and smoke alarms. Open instruction booklets are scattered around him like petals and, in a deep voice, he is imitating the fat guy from the store: “What you need is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use wireless system!” The screwdriver slips along the head of a bolt and embeds itself under the nail of his index finger. Ichiro leaps to his feet, squeezing his hurt finger in his fist. Holding in a cry, he hurries to the bathroom, without doing up his geta, and runs cold water over his finger. Once the pain dies down, he comes back in and stares at the red lacquered box. She costs five million yen. Is it her they want, those thugs? What else could be in there that they’d be interested in? A cello. Who would risk prison to steal some shabby instrument from some failure of a musician, a failure because... Because he’s addicted to videogames. No one. In his tower block there are hundreds of flats, and they spoke specifically of flat 17F. “Look after it,” Fuco Shima had said, “it’s safer here – I trust you more than I trust myself.” It is Eve they want. Ichiro picked up the screwdriver and walked towards the box. The idea of opening the box hadn’t crossed his mind, when his friend was confiding in him. Or had it? A doll worth five million yen, designed to make Japan dream, sitting in his living room for a whole week. And Ichiro? He’d been playing. Every since your mother died, you haven’t played a note, let alone auditioned for an orchestra. Him, he does nothing but play. Impulsively, he slots the screwdriver between the steel edges of the seal, and lifts it. The wire jumps like a tightly wound string. The cover of the box opens with a sound like teeth grinding together. Eve is attached to the box like a Barbie doll. Almost. The cord holds her just below her breasts, constricting them, pushing them up around the sugar flowers of her nipples. A finely wound shibari ties her up as though she were a roast, cutting into the octopus tattooed on her chest and pinning her wrists behind, then reappearing at the cleft of her buttocks and wrapping around one thigh, pulling it up. Her dark-angel’s face looks detached from the rest of her body, in spite of the strip of bamboo that she is obliged to hold between her teeth, and which is secured behind her head. She is luminous, even with one leg forced up to expose her sex, hairless and pink, spread for Ichiro, the kuritorisu twisted a little to one side above a perfectly rendered kitsukitsu. And Ichiro, in the grip of a violent erection, suddenly feels her fear, the arousal, the error; she offers herself to him and she is ashamed.
Ichiro grabs one of the knives he bought from Tokyo Hands and, with a few careful cuts, slices her free of her harness. Then he lowers her leg, to conceal her sex, resisting the temptation to touch her warm skin. When that’s done, he goes in search of his mother’s red kimono. Once she’s finally covered, he feels better. The kimono’s pattern is of pink herons taking flight from the smooth surface of the sea; it is the most precious thing his mother left to him.
Her absence.
Ma.
Eve seems conscious. Her cheeks turn pale as shells. The anger in her eyes fades.
Ichiro stretches out on the ground and begins to masturbate slowly. He tries to peek under the kimono at the cleft between Eve’s legs, but it is hidden within the folds of silk and he cannot catch sight of it.
*
He wakes with a start. Something metal has struck the outside wall of his flat. Ichiro hears the elevator door closing. He jumps to his feet, buckling his belt, and grabs the knife. His heart beats wildly, his breath reeks. He presses his eye to the spyhole and waits. Behind him, on the other side of the window, the sun sits just above a chimney like a scoop of orange ice cream in a cone. It will soon go down behind the snows of Mount Fuji. The city is still and silent, at this height. But then the screen of his mobile phone blinks, and rings without stopping. Nine missed calls.
*
At last something enters his field of vision. It’s an aluminium shopping trolley, filled with carrots and celery roots. Pushed by the old woman at 17 B.
Ichiro presses his forehead against the door, tries to slow his breath. When his pulse returns to normal, he unlocks the door and steps into the hall. No one, just the bent back of the old woman, who hobbles slowly towards her apartment.
“Ma’am?”
She turns, sees the knife, takes a step back.
“Ma’am, tell me, please, is today Wednesday or Thursday?”
The old lady scuttles quick as a rat into her apartment. Ichiro goes back to his tatami, glances at his mobile. The work day is over; they’ll leave him alone for the night. He’ll have just enough time to install the security camera and the smoke detector outside his door, in case he falls asleep. He picks up the alarm fixture and the screwdriver that gave him a black nail, and the installation guide. Now and then he looks up at the silhouette of Eve in the red kimono. She emits light, warmth: something that might disappear along with her. He says, “No one will take you away, Eve!” His words resonate in the silent flat and the sky grows dark above the city as the neon lights blink on.
By 19.35, Ichiro has woken a dozen times, going to the spyhole with the knife in his hand, expecting the thugs to be there, his heart banging in his chest. He has seen so many new faces going in and out of the seventeenth-floor apartments, heads he doesn’t know though he’s lived here for ten years
. His neighbours. Strangers who, for an instant, become assailants, sending his heartbeat into a frenzy. He hopes the coming and going will slow down soon; it’s nearly dinnertime. He leans the knife up against the door and goes to the toilet. He keeps his geta done up. He has done none of the things that usually mark the rhythm of his days. He hasn’t even played on his Playstation. Now he pisses without lifting the seat. “I’m going mad, Eve,” he says. And at that moment someone buzzes his door. His bladder freezes. He tries to swallow but his saliva too has dried up. As he zips up his trousers, he sees his hands are trembling. He catches a glimpse in the mirror of some survivor from the Kobe earthquake. He doesn’t recognise himself, but it doesn’t matter. He picks up the knife and, holding his breath, moves to the spyhole. Instinctively, he jumps back. The face is deformed by the curve of the glass, and very close.
“Hey, Ichiro, I know you’re in there.”
It’s Ryuko Mori’s voice. His colleague is not going to admit defeat. She even looks like a man.
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