by Ryu Murakami
The plush carpeting of the hotel corridor crunches like snow beneath our leather-soled shoes. It’s only ten o’clock, but everything is quiet—so quiet that it heightens the sense of being in a different world. You need to free yourself, Takaaki told me, and then went and betrayed those words himself. While my eyes follow the strangely bewitching movement of Yumiko’s hips, I’m thinking that his advice is still worth remembering. Tears well up again. Maybe this really is a different world, a place where people come to realize things about themselves.
Yumiko stops and turns to face me. She’s pointing at a door to my right that’s half open. Seeing the room number makes me realize that, thanks to the port, we forgot to take the elevator. We’re still on the first floor, and all the rooms along this corridor are luxury suites. I suggest we look inside. She shakes her head and says we mustn’t, then smiles mischievously. We make sure no one else is in the corridor before slipping through the door and closing it softly behind us. We still aren’t in the room itself but a sort of entrance hall or foyer.
“Look at this!” she whispers. “The entrance alone is bigger than my whole apartment!”
The door at the other end of the foyer is ajar as well. Wondering how I’d explain this if we were to be discovered, I open it and ease nose-first into a living room dimly lit by the moon through lace curtains. I decide that if we do get caught, all we’ll have to do is apologize and say we made a mistake. This is Japan, after all. And though I was afraid someone might be asleep in here, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The room is undisturbed. No butts in the ashtrays, no half-empty glasses, no clothing or newspapers or magazines lying about, and nothing on the writing desk or the two tables to indicate that anyone is staying here.
“You don’t think—” Her voice is a little too loud, and I shush her, putting a finger to her lips. I wonder if I’ve ever touched a girl’s lips before. They’re cold and soft. “You don’t think there’s a dead person in the bathroom or anything, do you?” she whispers.
In this darkness it almost sounds plausible, and my heartbeat quickens a little.
“Don’t be silly,” I tell her. “This is Japan. There’s no safer place than the backwoods of Kyushu.”
It doesn’t feel like the backwoods of Kyushu, though. I can make out a Dutch-style canal through the lace curtains, and beyond it is the Domtoren, with a red light blinking on top. Ripples run over the slow-moving surface of the water and fan out around two white shapes that are floating there.
“See the swans?” Yumiko is beaming, her eyes shining. I nod, forgetting to breathe for a moment. Through the lace, the swans look like negatives of silhouettes, perfectly still but with fuzzy, curving outlines and the soft warmth of life. They begin gliding slowly toward the bank, looking as if they’re about to be transformed back into ballerinas.
Yumiko’s eyes are still shining when we peek into the bedroom. Two queen-size beds, each with its own bedcover, are pushed together to form a big dark pool of velvet. The bedcovers are undisturbed. I look in the closet, but it’s empty. The hangers dangling from the closet rod make me think of corpses again.
“I need to lie down,” Yumiko gasps, touching her forehead with the back of her hand. “I think I drank too much. I feel like my heart’s going to explode.”
I help her get settled on the bed, then bend over and put my lips to her ear.
“Don’t worry. I’ll check the bathroom for dead people.”
“No!” she says, in a gasping whisper. “Please stay with me. I’m scared.”
The curtains are closed. I quietly open them. Moonbeams and lights from the other buildings seep into the room and palely illuminate her legs.
“Do you feel sick?” I ask, and she frowns and nods several times. I undo the top button of her blouse, then unhook her skirt and slip her shoes off.
“Just relax,” I say, and put my index finger to her lips again. They’re still cold and soft. I smooth her hair, help her out of her cardigan, and kiss her. I part her lips with my tongue and lick her teeth and gums, and I feel both of our heartbeats begin to race.
As I explore the softness of her breasts and wonder about the size and shape of her nipples, I begin to experience an intense but somehow nostalgic feeling. I remember the shock, the sorrow, and the strange thrill I felt as a very small girl, alone in my room, when the head of the antique doll I was playing with suddenly came off in my hand.
I peel her white socks off, revealing her toes and unpainted toenails and freeing a faint scent of leather. I want to kiss those toes so badly I can hardly breathe, but I don’t. I’m undoing the rest of her buttons, from the top down, when she speaks.
“Tissue. Tissue paper.”
I take this to mean that she’s about to be sick and decide I’ll have to carry her to the bathroom. I catch a whiff of her shampoo as I slide my arm under her neck. “No!” she whispers and wraps both arms around me. Her eyes are closed tight, the eyelashes quivering, and her neck and shoulders are stiff with tension. Her skirt is hitched up now, exposing white knees and thighs against the dark velvet of the bedcover. Cradling her head against my breast, I sit there watching the wavelike wrinkles in the deep blue material shift with each small movement of her legs.
Moonlight through the window casts a rectangle, like a framed picture, in the center of which two ivory legs float on the velvet darkness. The lustrous material is like a liquid, so thick that nothing will sink in it. I reach down and ease the skirt higher. One white leg, bent slightly at the knee. The thigh, the calf, the foot, each with its own curve and outline. With the tip of a finger I trace the length of those mysterious curves, from the ankle up, and sigh, then begin the return journey, barely touching her skin
“Please use a tissue,” I hear her say, as a faint smell wafts into the air around us. It’s the first time I’ve ever smelled this particular scent coming from another woman. It’s like blood, or guts.
“Please,” she hisses, pressing her lips to my ear. It’s not a whimper but a contained appeal. “Use a tissue. If not, you might get AIDS too.”
She shifts her legs as she says this, and the scent grows stronger. Lurking in the space where the two legs meet is a creature with no outer layer, just flesh and blood. I can see it breathing.
“Tissue? Tissue would just fall apart.”
I untangle myself from her arms and help her off with her skirt. So this, I’m thinking, is what men see as they breathe in the scent of that creature—those men whose words lose their power, and who then end up losing even the words. It would be better to strip them of all power. And clothes. And then line ’em up and shoot ’em.
“Wait. I’ve got something better than tissue,” I tell her.
I reach into my pocketbook and take out my sleeping tablets. I’m not after the pills themselves but the thin vinyl sheet I wrapped them in. Unfolded, the vinyl is about the size of a postcard. I dangle this before her eyes, then lick one side of it. I spread her legs and slip a pillow under her. I don’t take off her panties but slide the crotch of them to one side and use my fingers to separate her lips slightly before applying the vinyl. With the mixture of my saliva and her juices, it adheres immediately, like a layer of transparent skin.
I can see the fine peach-fuzz around her bellybutton gently rising and falling. I don’t use my tongue right away, only my fingertips. With my index and middle fingers in a narrow V, I caress the vinyl skin on either side of her most sensitive spot. She puts one hand over her mouth, and with the other grabs a fistful of velvet bedcover. She tries to close her legs, but I spread them wider. Then she bucks with her hips and kicks a bit with her feet, so I give her a slap on the thigh, hard enough to leave a red impression. The slap echoes sharply in the room, and she accidentally bites her own hand.
The vinyl makes a sound like thin glass cracking, and beads of sweat ooze out on her bottom. The palm of my hand—the one that’s supporting her ass and help
ing position things—is damp with it.
When I aim the point of my tongue at the spot, the creature begins to squirm. It’s kind of comical—and greedy and pathetic. The vinyl crackles with each contraction or hiccup. I strip it off.
“Don’t! I told you, I might have AIDS!”
“It’s all right,” I say, from between her thighs. “I don’t care about that.”
After a while I see her own tongue peek out between parted teeth, as her legs begin to shiver and spasm.
“Now let me do you,” she says, after the tremors have subsided. I grab a bath towel to cover her breasts and stomach. “You may not believe this,” she says, “but that was my first time.”
I don’t know whether she means her first time with a woman or her first time to reach orgasm, but I kiss her lips and stroke her hair and murmur in her ear:
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to decide anything. You don’t even have to think about it being the first time.”
“It smells of sex,” she says shyly, then giggles. It does smell of sex, but without any male smell. “Shouldn’t we get out of here? I’ll take a quick shower.”
“What’s the hurry?” I kiss her cheek and nose and eyelids and neck, and stroke her sweat-cooled bottom. “Don’t you want to watch the swans again?”
“I do!” she says, with childlike delight. We step barefoot over the carpet to the window, and stand here cheek-to-cheek, gazing out at the canal.
At the Airport
I call Saito again but hang up when it goes straight to voice mail. The big glass doors slide open and a group of people carrying skis comes in. It’s bright inside the airport but even brighter outside, so at first the ski group appears only in silhouette. Now they’re passing right behind me. Seated directly across from me is a man reading a weekly magazine. On the cover is the face of an actress, a face I see on television now and then. I can’t remember her name, but I know it includes the character for sakura, cherry blossom. I don’t have a ticket for the plane. I’m supposed to meet Saito in front of the ANA check-in counter. He’s bringing the tickets.
The man with the magazine has looked me over a couple of times. He’s probably in his late thirties, wearing a cream-colored trench coat over a gray suit. “There are rows of seats facing each other in front of the ANA counter,” Saito said on the phone yesterday. Saito is someone I met four months ago. All the seats around me are occupied. A lot of people are milling about, ready to snatch one as soon as somebody gets up and leaves. They don’t make a show of wanting a seat, but it’s the only signal they’re sending out.
Unintentional eye contact with the magazine man. His eyes drop to my shoulders, then slide quickly down my body, all the way to the toes of my boots, and back to his magazine. I’m wearing a beige woolen coat over a black dress, and a designer scarf I bought some time ago. My travel bag is a designer brand too but not a very expensive one. I don’t know how cold Kumamoto gets in winter, so I’m dressed no differently from usual here in Tokyo. I was thinking of checking the temperature in Kumamoto on the evening news yesterday before dropping my boy off at my mother’s place, but he was making a bit of a fuss, and we ended up leaving before the weather report came on.
Diagonally above me is the giant screen showing the status of departing flights. It says that boarding has begun for our flight, ANA 645 to Kumamoto. The screen lists more flights than you can count, all the way down to one at 3:15 p.m. There are lots going to Fukuoka and Sapporo but only a few to Kumamoto. I look at my watch and wonder how much time we’ve got till they close the gate. Now there’s an announcement for a flight to Fukuoka, and the man with the magazine gets up. He looks me over again before he walks off. Is there something about me that suggests I’m that sort of woman?
I was divorced two years ago and have a son who’s about to be four. I never got along with my husband’s mother, from the day of the wedding on, and in the end that’s what made our marriage fail. My husband ran a machine parts factory left him by his father, but it closed down not long after the divorce. He told me that most of his client companies had gone bankrupt. He was a gentle, serious person, and he was kind to me, but kinder to his mother. She had trouble with her back and shoulder, and underwent all sorts of treatments—chiropractic and chi sessions, acupuncture, moxibustion, and so on, including some much dodgier remedies. It cost a fortune. Light exercise would probably have been the best thing for her, but generally she just sat around the house, waiting for the different therapists to show up.
After the magazine reader leaves, the male half of an elderly married couple sits down in the seat opposite. Their clothes announce that they’re returning to their home in the country, and their faces and hands are darkly sunburned. The man’s wearing a wrinkled white shirt, a red tie, and a dark brown suit with sleeves that are too short. His thin hair is plastered down and combed straight back, and a shoulder bag is tucked securely under his arm. The small woman standing beside him has a severe stoop that makes her look even smaller. There’s no expression on her face, only an unnatural-looking layer of white foundation. She’s wearing a bulky orange hand-knit cardigan over a white blouse.
You can tell a lot about people just from their appearance. I look down at my hands. On my left wrist is a Cartier watch. It’s the only thing I’ve bought for myself since I started working in the sex trade.
After the divorce, I put my son in daycare and got a job at a gas station in the neighborhood. I worked as a cashier, along with a girl named Akemi-chan, but after a while I was let go. Akemi-chan was twenty-two at the time, and I was thirty-one. There was a price war between the various gas stations, and profits at ours kept declining, so I guess they decided to cut down to the younger part-time workers, who didn’t cost them as much.
For some time after the divorce I lived in a condo that normally housed employees of my husband’s factory, but when the factory folded I knew I would have to leave: the condo was included in the foreclosure.
Without the factory, my husband was no longer able to pay alimony or child support. He was really ashamed about this, even cried in front of me, but I didn’t see any point in blaming him. My hometown is in Fukushima Prefecture, and my parents wanted me to come back, but my older brother and his wife were living with them already, and it just wouldn’t have worked. I had to find an apartment.
I tried waitressing at a little bar in Osaki, but I don’t have much tolerance for alcohol, and I’m not good at making conversation with people I don’t know. Before long I began to get these stabbing pains in my stomach, and had to quit. Even with my savings and the two hundred thousand yen my husband had scraped together, I didn’t have enough to rent a two-room apartment with kitchen and bath. I needed to earn about three hundred thousand a month. I asked the advice of a real estate appraiser I’d met at the bar in Osaki, and he told me about a certain “fantasy club” that he knew to be a reputable place.
A description of the club in a job-search magazine said that girls were guaranteed thirty-five thousand a day and could work as little as one day a week, and that the clients were all “carefully screened gentlemen of solid character.” After telephoning, I went to the address given, which was in among the jumble of buildings outside the west exit of Gotanda Station. We call it “the club,” but in fact it’s just an office with a small studio. They agreed to take me on, took some photos, and registered me under the made-up name Yui. In the studio were all kinds of costumes for the girls to dress up in, to accommodate different customers’ fantasies, which of course is what the place was all about. That same day I entertained my first client.
“I guess you can’t smoke here.” The old man across from me says something of this sort to his wife, but there’s no change in her deadpan expression, no response at all. “Save my seat for a minute,” he says, and stands up. His accent sounds as if he’s from western Japan. As soon as the woman sits down, he pulls a pack of Mild Seven from his
breast pocket and heads for the smoking corner. I watch her extract a small, cellophane-wrapped confection from her cloth handbag. She raises it to her mouth in cupped hands, as if to hide it, and uses her teeth to open the wrapper. It’s a pastry of some kind, or a cookie or something; and as she chews, a few crumbs fall on her navy blue slacks. She brushes them away with her right hand.
A solid mass of people is swirling around us, like a herd of animals, or a school of fish. I’ve tried Saito’s cell phone four times now. I wonder if he isn’t coming. He works for a consulting firm and is six years younger than me. I’m now thirty-three, but “Yui” is registered as twenty-five. “You can easily pass for mid-twenties,” the owner of the club told me, adding that the average man hasn’t a clue about a woman’s age.
I first met Saito on a Friday evening, at a love hotel in Meguro. He was with me for two hours, but mostly he just kissed me and stroked my cheek. “Yui-san, wasn’t it?” he said. “What a pretty face you have.” The next time I saw him was three days later, again for two hours, and then the following day for three hours, and he’s been a regular ever since. “You have to watch out for customers like that,” the boss told me. “A lot of times girls let it go to their heads and start allowing the guy to take them on private dates, and sleep with them or whatever, but you wouldn’t fall for that sort of thing, would you?” I told him not to worry. Penetration is strictly against the rules of the club; usually the clients masturbate, or the woman helps them out with her hand or mouth.
The fifth or sixth time I saw Saito, neither of us took our clothes off. “Would you like to go out to dinner?” he asked, stroking my face. We left the little love hotel and went to a restaurant on the top floor of a hotel across from Shinagawa Station. “Can you tell how much I like you, Yui?” he said, between spoonfuls of a cold jellied consommé. “Well, you come to see me about twice a week,” I said, “so I had a feeling you didn’t hate me.” I was having pumpkin cream soup. It was a nice yellow color, with two green mint leaves floating on the surface. “But Saito-san, you don’t know the first thing about me—not even my real name.”