by Ryu Murakami
“Are you busy tonight? I’ll be finished with all my work by late afternoon. Perhaps I could interest you in a nice meal? There’s a quiet Italian restaurant in Akasaka, behind the TBS complex. Shall we say six-thirty? It’s a bit difficult to find, so let’s meet at the coffee shop across from the main entrance to TBS.”
You told him how you make a living, and he wasn’t the least bit surprised, remember? He knows all about that sort of thing, don’t you see? He’s targeting you.
At the restaurant, everything is made out of marble—the floor, the walls, the columns, the ceiling. The nutritionist asks about my family and things, but I still can’t say anything except Oh and Ah and Uh-huh, and all the waiters and busboys are like the handsomest guys I’ve ever seen, and the food has lots of weird-shaped shellfish and fish, and I’m really nervous because I grew up where there wasn’t any ocean and never saw food like this before, where something that looks like ketchup isn’t ketchup and what I think is a slice of tomato turns out to be cheese, and because I’m nervous my throat is dry as a bone, so I just keep drinking the wine and eating.
“Tell me, do you have any special goals?”
“Me? Nuh-uh.”
“Like one day having a house by the sea, or traveling through Europe... I’m sure most young women have a dream of some kind. Don’t you?”
It may be because I’m hardly saying anything myself, but both he and Kiyomi are chattering away, with Kiyomi still saying he’s dangerous and I should leave right this minute.
“Don’t you think having a dream is important? The women who come to my clinic all have an ambition to lose weight and become more attractive, and even that is a dream of sorts. But no one can make her dreams come true by just sitting around dreaming. You realize that, of course?”
At first Kiyomi just sounded bossy, and then when I kept not responding she acted like she was just giving me advice, and now she’s begging me to listen.
Why aren’t you paying attention to what I’m telling you?
“Almost anything is possible if you’re willing to make the effort. Dreams are meant to be realized.”
I try to pay attention to what Kiyomi’s saying, but this man is talking the whole time, and I’m starting to feel the wine, and if I don’t talk back and forth with Kiyomi it’s hard for me to understand what she’s going on about.
“Actually, that’s what I find so interesting about you. You’ve abandoned any dreams you had without giving them a chance because you’ve got no self-confidence. You think you’re ugly, but that’s not the case at all—you’re quite pretty but probably too nearsighted to see it. People nowadays think almost any woman who wears nice clothes and knows how to put on makeup is attractive. Real beauty is more than that, though. You’re beautiful in your own way, but you’re frightened of something, and you seem to think that Kiyomi actually exists. She doesn’t. Did you ever see a movie called The Shining?”
The reason I even try to listen to Kiyomi is because of what happened a few times before when she nagged me like this. The first time was when I was supposed to use this electric facial machine at the beauty salon I was working at after graduating from high school, and Kiyomi begged me not to touch it, so I didn’t, even though I was just a trainee and the manager got mad at me. But it turned out the machine was a phony model they’d bought from some foreigner, and a few days later a customer got electrocuted and they had to call an ambulance. The second time was in a dream where I was somewhere in South America, and Kiyomi and I were walking along together holding hands, and she told me that Mikiko-chan, who was my best friend in middle school, was sick, and when I called Mikiko’s house the next morning they told me she had some kind of inflammation of the brain, so I hurried over to see her, and on the train home Kiyomi said Mikiko was going to die on May 5, Children’s Day, and I started crying, and sure enough Mikiko died on Children’s Day.
“You haven’t seen it? Well, there’s a boy in the movie who claims there’s someone else living inside him. The thing is, this boy is psychic but terrified of being that way, so he imagines the psychic part of himself to be a different person. And he talks to that person, just as you do.
“I’m not saying it’s exactly the same for you, but there is a common thread: fear. You too are terrified of something. In my line of work I come in contact with a lot of athletes, and I can tell you that the top players in all sports have psychotherapists or psychologists as members of their staff. As a result, we’ve learned a lot, in a scientific sense—or perhaps I should say a philosophical sense—about pressure, fear, self-doubt, and so on. Take players who always underachieve in the really important games. You know how people often talk about being their own worst enemy? Well, that’s literally true. If a professional golfer blows a big lead and loses a tournament, it can make him feel like a loser in every aspect of his life. That’s what fear can do, you see. You become accustomed to failure. You start hearing this shadowy little voice, the voice of resignation, telling you there’s no need to win, that if you don’t give it your best effort, then it won’t hurt so much if you lose—because it won’t be the real you who has lost, you see.
“I think your case is an extreme example of that. You have dreams, and the power to realize them, but the prospect of their never coming true is too painful to bear. So, to protect yourself, you created an imaginary dead person who’s managed to do the things you wanted to do. That’s your Kiyomi. I could see it the first time we met. Do you understand what I’m saying? Kiyomi is you, which means it’s possible for you to become Kiyomi.
“You’ve had these dreams for a long time. But the thought of fighting to make them happen, only to fail, frightens you. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, mind you. Everyone’s afraid. But what really surprises me is how concrete your dream is—and by ‘your dream,’ I mean of course Kiyomi. You know, a lawyer in an old television series once said something that really impressed me. ‘If you don’t know what you want, you’ll never find it.’ That’s well put, isn’t it? I always try to keep that in mind.
“Now, you—your real hopes and dreams are very clear. You have a detailed idea of who Kiyomi is, which means you know exactly what you want. And that’s a good thing. But where you go wrong is in relinquishing all your own dreams to her. Listen, I can help you. I can help you get them back, and attain them yourself.”
I don’t understand what he’s on about, and Kiyomi is talking to me the whole time, and I go on drinking the nice purplish wine till my forehead and fingertips begin to ache, and I really start wanting to do it and think about going to the office and asking them to fix me up with a customer, but then the nutritionist invites me to have another drink at his place. Kiyomi keeps telling me not to go, but I do anyway, and he takes me to this seven-story building behind a cemetery in I think it must be Aoyama
The condominium is one big room, about ten times as big as my apartment, like something in one of those glossy lifestyle magazines, with a huge television and a bar and a sofa with satiny upholstery, and he plays an old movie on laser disc with a skinny actress in it named Audrey Hepburn.
I’m begging you to leave here at once. If you won’t do that, at least call somebody and tell them where you are. It doesn’t matter who. Call the office or that pub near your apartment, anybody.
“Um, can I use the telephone?”
He’s getting out some ice and liquor bottles and things, but turns around with a kind of grouchy look on his face.
“Sorry, but I’m expecting an important call. I hope you don’t mind waiting till later.”
Kiyomi shouts, You’ve got to call immediately, but I ignore her and think about one of the waiters at the Italian restaurant.
“Who did you want to phone?”
“My office,” is all I say, but I guess he knows what kind of office it is without my explaining.
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” he says. He’s pouring some b
randy, which I’ve had just once before in my life, into this great big glass about the size of a fishbowl. “I’m... how shall I put it? I’m different from your average man on the street. Even you can see that, can’t you?”
Kiyomi is trying to get me to answer her and starts crying and talking about when we first met, but I just glug away at that strong-smelling brandy the same way I did with the wine, and for some reason, I guess because people don’t usually bother talking to me, I begin to think this guy is really nice. But Kiyomi doesn’t get drunk even when I do.
Where would I go if something happened to you? You’re the only one who’ll have me and isn’t an alcoholic or mentally handicapped or an infant or a tramp, and you speak Japanese. I can speak English, and I understand a little French and Spanish and can read German, but that doesn’t help. I once occupied a foreigner for a while—I told you about that, remember? That Swiss man who was a masochist? Well, he only indulged in his perversions two or three times a month, so it wasn’t really such a problem, and in a lot of ways he was ideal for me—the head of an interior design company who owned holiday homes in Monaco and Chamonix and collected lithographs by Klimt—and he liked me too and we had a good rapport, but he didn’t understand Japanese. You don’t know how hard that can be. It left me exhausted. So you’re really all I have.
“I’m different because I’m a man with a passion.”
I’m thinking about the tall waiter at the Italian restaurant, and when I close my eyes my head is spinning, and all I know is I’d like to be fucked by a hard male body.
“I’ve specialized in both nutrition, which deals with physiology, and psychology, which deals with consciousness, and I’ve studied the relation each has to the other. So I’m in a rather unique position. Normally—or, should I say, in the old days—if I were worried about you, I’d tell you that for moral reasons you ought to break off all connection with that office of yours, which I presume is a call girl service. But, although I am interested in you, and worried about you, I happen to know that there are a lot of things in this world that morality can’t fix. The truth is that very few of the world’s problems can be solved by morality. Do-gooders will try to stop you doing ‘bad’ things by reminding you what your parents would think or what people would say, but that doesn’t help anyone. Take your case, for example. There’s a certain inevitability to your working as a call girl, because of the guilt you feel about having created your imaginary friend Kiyomi. You want to purge that guilt—‘purge’ meaning, you know, to root out or release—and unconsciously you’ve decided you need to punish yourself. I don’t necessarily think you should quit being a call girl—in fact, selling your body may be the only way for you to separate yourself from Kiyomi and get your real self back—but you mustn’t stay with the same people you’re with now.”
The sofa isn’t very comfortable, and my head droops down till my chin hits my chest, and without any warning I throw up a bit of the Italian food, two gray, sticky little shellfish that plop out onto the suit my mother bought me without telling my father. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” the man says, and leads me to the bathroom, but I can’t throw up any more and just rest my head on the toilet seat and start falling asleep, and vaguely, somewhere far away, I can hear the phone ringing.
You go ahead and sleep. I’ll let you know what’s going on, Kiyomi says, still crying, so that’s what I do.
The bathroom door is open, showing about half of the living room, and the nutritionist is there with three other men and a woman wearing a white mask like surgeons wear, with a big raincoat draped over her shoulders.
One of the men is a little white-haired old coot who looks kind of familiar, but the other two just look like regular businessmen. When they take the mask off the woman her face is all funny, because there’s this thing like a clothespin across her mouth, like thin strips of wood clamped over her lips and tongue, and drool starts dribbling down onto the floor.
“Where’d you find her?” the nutritionist asks, and one of the businessmen says, “At a little hot springs resort outside Nara,” and then tells the other one to go get the tools out of the car. I’m not actually seeing all this myself, but Kiyomi describes it to me so well that I feel like it’s me who’s watching. They talk about me at one point, the guy who was giving the orders saying, “What a pig,” and the nutritionist saying, “She’s not right in the head, but I thought we could have some fun with her.” Then the other one comes back pushing a handcart loaded with all kinds of equipment and says to the white-haired old man, “Anyway, it’s a good thing you were here in Tokyo, Sensei, or she’d have gone to waste, we’d have had to get rid of her. It’s going to get a little messy, so you’d better put this on.” And he hands the old coot a clear vinyl poncho type of thing.
The businessmen move the sofa and TV and everything into the corners and spread a thick vinyl sheet on the floor, then roll an air tank in and use it to inflate a little kiddie pool. When they take off the woman’s raincoat, she’s wearing this funny thing over her T-shirt that’s like the sacks they put potatoes in, with leather straps and buckles all over it.
“Shall we start, then?” says the businessman, and the white-haired old coot hands him an envelope, and he hands it to the nutritionist, and the nutritionist counts the ten-thousand-yen bills inside and nods and goes to the CD player in the corner and puts on some classical music, like an opera or something, and they put a vinyl bib on the woman, like in a beauty salon, and cut off all her hair with scissors, then shave her bald with electric clippers, doing it so roughly that she starts bleeding in places.
The woman rolls her head around trying to resist, but with the wooden thing on her mouth and the clothing like a potato sack, she can’t move anything else or say anything. “Let’s hear her voice,” the old coot says, and the businessman tells him the soundproofing isn’t so good in this building but goes ahead and takes the clothespin off her mouth anyway. She can’t move her jaw at first and just opens her nostrils real wide, and tears come spilling out of her eyes, and the old coot starts filming her face with a video camera.
“You want something to cry about? Go ahead and cry!” he says, slapping her hard on the cheek with one hand but still shooting the video with the other, while the nutritionist pulls out his thing and starts jerking off.
Then they put her in the pool on all fours and hit her and kick her, and she craps and pees as the old man tries to force his drooping weenie in her mouth. The businessman sets up a little vinyl tentlike thing and takes out an electric grinder and power saw, and the woman starts wailing and trying to climb out of that mucky pool but can’t because of the potato sack, and the coot puts on a pair of vinyl gloves and says, “You know better than to make all that noise,” and stuffs one of her turds in her mouth, and then they pull her out and clean her ankles, and the room starts to smell of alcohol and poop, and the old man changes gloves and gets his black leather shoes from the entrance while the nutritionist, after putting his dick back in his pants without coming, holds the video camera for him and keeps filming, and one businessman cranks up the volume on the CD player while the other puts the woman’s ankles on the edge of the pool, and in nothing flat they cut off her feet with the power saw. The woman screams with pain, and the nutritionist moves the camera from her face to the feet lying separate in the pool, and one of the businessmen sprays something on the stubs that turns all white and sticky and stops them from squirting blood, but with nothing below the ankles they don’t even look like legs now, and the other one takes the feet, which look like some kind of giant Italian shellfish, out of the pool. He puts them inside the little vinyl tent, then chops the meat up into tiny pieces with a long, skinny knife and cuts all the tendons and uses the grinder to grind the bones into powder, and then he puts it all in a big salad bowl and takes it into the bathroom where I am and pulls me away from the toilet and checks my pulse and says to the nutritionist, “She’s sleeping like a log, did you use that d
rug?” The nutritionist says, “Yes, I shot her up right after you called,” and the businessman flushes the bowlful of meat chunks and powdered bones down the toilet, flushing four times in all, and meanwhile the old man is holding the footless woman by the legs and trying to fuck her. Then they inject her with something that knocks her out, and after that it takes about an hour to clean everything up.
I really am asleep, but Kiyomi tells me everything that’s going on, like an announcer at a baseball game or something, and when everyone has left and the nutritionist is asleep, she forces me to wake up, and we leave. But it wouldn’t be safe to go back to my apartment, she says, so I go to the office, and they send me to meet an all-night customer at a love hotel in Shibuya, and when I get there and take off my clothes I feel something in my pocket, and it’s the penlight I was going to give to the nutritionist.
“That was all just a dream, right?” I say to Kiyomi as I’m taking a shower, but she just cries and cries and doesn’t answer, and something is stuck in my hair, and when I pull it out it looks like it might be blood but could also be some of the shellfish I threw up.
I ask the customer to turn off all the lights, and then I switch on the penlight, and as I’m pointing it here and there he laughs and tells me I’m a filthy-minded thing, and in the pitch darkness I shine the light on my ankles and say, “Look, Kiyomi, my feet are still attached.” And then I start laughing too.
Topaz
When he and I crossed paths it was as if one of my internal organs burst, and I thought I might collapse right there on the street.
The reason it had such an effect on me is that on this particular Saturday afternoon, after being with the type of customer I can’t stand and getting super depressed, I didn’t feel like going back to the office but thought I’d buy something nice to cheer myself up, and the whole time I was walking around shopping in Aoyama I happened to be thinking about that very man. I’ve had a crush on him since I was in middle school.