by Ryu Murakami
“Can homos have children?” he asked him.
“Sure, why not? They’ve got sperm like everybody else, and plenty of them don’t let on they’re queer and get married and have children and everything.” His friend was something of an expert. “Seems they even like to keep their wives pregnant all the time so they don’t have to do it with them.”
“And is it hereditary?” he asked next.
“That I don’t know,” his friend admitted.
D, as it happened, was already aware of his own preferences. Not that he didn’t fancy doing it with women, but to get that far he had to have eaten a particular food: fat. It became a kind of ritual; he would sit down to a plate of fat, eye it for a while, savor the aroma, rub some around on his lips, and then let it dissolve on his tongue. As it slid down his throat and began to burn in his belly, he would invariably begin to want a woman. After orgasm, however, just as invariably, he would feel the digesting fat begin to coat his insides, sapping the heat from his body and leaving him feeling sick.
D’s career thus far had centered around the discovery and promotion of two bona fide rock stars. The first he had found in the days when he still worked for a record company; he had ignored the skepticism and opposition of the other producers and pushed the singer through to a debut. His reward was a smashing success. The second came after D had struck out on his own, and this time he independently produced eight albums for the singer before he finally moved to an English label. Each of the eight had gone gold, making D an immensely wealthy and powerful man. In both cases, he had picked singers who, according to the common wisdom, had no commercial value, but to him there had been no doubt from the beginning that the two kids were stars just waiting to be discovered.
D had a genius for picking out talented young men, but it was genius based on a system. Five days a week, he would gorge himself on fatty meat before making his rounds; any kid who still looked good to him on a bellyful of fat was invited to dinner. Those who failed to answer “music” when asked about their interests were fucked and sent home. Those who said the magic word were booked for a return engagement. Before these second meetings, D would eat an enormous quantity of fat and empty himself in a random vagina; then he was ready to try out the young man’s musical talents. If the system was followed to the letter, his judgment at the audition was absolutely foolproof. Hashi was only the third ever to pass muster.
In Hashi’s case, not only had D consumed the requisite quantity of fat, but the woman herself had had a big white body—a good sign. As he listened to Hashi’s song, however, his reaction hadn’t been what could be called typical: he’d felt an overwhelming need to puke all over the bed, a feeling that only gradually faded into a warm sensation in his gut. The song had been almost atonal, the voice reedy and hoarse, but from the moment Hashi opened his mouth the tune had seemed to rush in through D’s pores to grab at his insides. When it had finally subsided, D realized the room had grown horribly silent. It was only afterward he understood that his brain had resisted Hashi’s song but the other organs had fallen instantly under its spell. And when he asked for an encore, Hashi sang a second song that rattled him even more, giving him moments of pleasure as intense as the gloom it also caused.
To say the least, the performance set him thinking. The kid can definitely sing—no doubt about it, damnedest thing I ever heard. Problem is, the first time you hear him, it makes you feel like shit, and people who feel like shit don’t buy records. What I’ve got to do is figure out some way to get people to hear the kid sing without knowing what they’re listening to; then when they think they’re hearing him the first time, they’ll actually have heard him before. The solution, fortunately, was simple enough: promote Hashi as the Coin Locker Boy, letting the addictive, repellent singing take over in due course.
The day Hashi finished making his first record, D told him he could have anything he wanted for dinner. Hashi ordered a rice omelette. They were in the dining room of The Spaceship looking out over the ocean. On the wall was a print of men dressed like priests and hermaphrodite children riding enormous butterflies with lips on their wings—an illustration from a two-volume study of Incan myths that D had published. The wallpaper was a deep, lustrous red, the floor a gold metal that rang oddly as D’s cook, a tall, muscular, high-heeled woman, entered the room.
“Do you want crab or shrimp in that rice omelette?” she asked.
“Crab,” said Hashi. “Uh… excuse me…,” he added, staring at her, “didn’t you play volleyball in the Olympics? I remember seeing you on TV.”
“Must have been my mother,” the woman laughed. “But I used to throw the javelin,” she said, flashing a mouthful of gold caps. D decided on some duck pâté and a cassis sherbet.
“Heard you and the drummer had a squabble yesterday. What did you say to him? He was mad as hell,” said Mr. D.
“I told him he was making a lot of noise… ’cause he was.”
“The drummer?”
“… I hate it when they just pound away.”
“He’s the best drummer around,” said D.
“Then I guess I just hate drums.”
“Hate drums? What do you mean, ‘hate drums’?”
“Like I said, they make too much noise.”
“Hashi, you’re a weird sucker,” said D, his narrow eyes narrowing a bit more. In all the time Hashi had known him, he had never caught a glimpse of D’s pupils. The pâté glistened on his lips and teeth. “You told me once you like Helen Merrill better than Carmen McCrae.”
“So?”
“So why?”
“No particular reason,” said Hashi.
“There must be a reason,” D insisted.
“No, not really. That’s just the way it is. I like Clara Neumaus better than Elizeth Cardoso, Schwarzkopf better than Maria Callas. Anything wrong with that?”
“Maybe not. But there does seem to be a pattern forming: you pick the sister types over the mother types all the way down the line. Perhaps because there’s always a mother type around when people are born,” he speculated.
Hashi ate the outside of the omelette, then stuck his fork into the rice flecked with bits of scarlet crab. In the middle of it all, the fork punctured a steamed tomato, releasing a sourish smell that brought back a memory of someone stamping on a raw tomato. It was a child’s sockless foot in small black tennis shoes, and when the thing had rolled by, the foot snapped out, sending a spray of red juice flying. The smell now was identical, pervasive, a smell that might have filled the air at the instant of his birth.
“Mr. D, I’m going to be a singer,” said Hashi, half announcing, half asking.
“Of course you are. Now eat your omelette.”
“I’m really happy,” said Hashi, trying to picture the future.
“Fine, now eat,” said D. “It’s bad for the farmers if you kids stop eating rice.”
“But do you know why I’m so happy?” asked Hashi.
“Because you’re going to be a star.”
“It’s partly that, but it’s also ’cause I feel like I’ve broken out of myself, left something behind. You see what I mean?”
“No, can’t say I do. But I can tell you this: you are going to sell records, kid.”
“You know, there wasn’t one thing on that island I loved, not one thing. I may have thought there was at the time, but there was nothing there for me. So that’s why I broke out; something told me that there must be something better somewhere, that there must be a place I could find something to love. At night, after I’ve been singing all day, I go to bed and everything seems obvious. I spent my whole life up to now in a daze. The whole place was wrong for me, and I had to leave it, I had to get clear.
“You often hear these stories about a pet, a little cat or something, that gets lost and then taken in by a new owner who lives far away. It stays for a while, but it can never quite settle down, and one day it just takes off and goes on this long journey, overcoming all these obstacles to find its
way back home—its real home, that is. I guess I’m one of those cats, and when I got to the city, when I got to sing, I knew I was finally home.”
“A lost kitten, eh? Maybe so,” said D. “But seriously, Hashi, would you stop yacking and eat that rice?… I know I’ve told you that there’s something about rice that gives me the creeps. Not you? Don’t you get the feeling there’s something a little off about it, the way it just sits there in the dish? It’s a bit like a rugby ball, if you see what I mean: it’s safe enough, predictable, as long as you’ve got it in your hands or you’re pinning it on the field, but once you kick it and you’ve got it rolling along end over end, there’s no telling where it’ll go. Exactly like rice. It’s like farming itself, and all us Japanese are basically farmers deep down… You see what I’m getting at here?”
“Can’t say I do, exactly,” said Hashi, bewildered.
“Doesn’t matter one way or the other. Let’s drop it. But your story about the cat did remind me of a little puss I found when I was a kid. My dad was a tough old bastard—used to get mad at me if I cried at a sad movie—but he did have a soft spot for animals, and when I found this cat, he let me keep it out in the storehouse. Now this was some cat, beautiful long hair—black, brown, and cream, all mixed together—and I always thought it probably escaped from a pet shop somewhere. Anyway, I found it while it was still a kitten, and it got pretty attached to me. But that cat taught me something I’ve never forgotten: cats have this way of competing with each other to see who can be most aloof—it’s their way of showing their strength. You know anything about psychology? Suppose we have two cats, people, whatever; call them A and B. There’s always going to be one of them who’s the leader, who calls the shots, and that’s always the one who doesn’t seem to care, the one who’s most casual about the whole thing. You follow me?”
“…”
“Maybe it’d be easier to understand if we say A and B are a man and a woman. Now suppose A falls in love with B, but B acts as if she doesn’t give a shit about A; naturally, B’s gonna have A by the balls. With cats it’s the same thing, indifference is power; and it’s even worse with the kind that costs a pile of money and has a pedigree and all that shit. Then you have to take care of it like it was made of gold because if it dies your investment goes down the toilet. It’s not long before the cat figures this out—it doesn’t have to worry about where its next meal is coming from, it doesn’t have to worry about anything—and then it has you; it’s won the war of indifference. Maybe that’s why the one I had as a kid was such a good cat; it was just a stray that followed me home, so I didn’t really care if it lived or died, and that meant I won the war right at the start. All I had to do was give it a little milk when it came rubbing its head against my leg and that cat was mine. Wherever I went, it came along, whatever I did, it was right there watching.
“Then one day the cat disappeared for a while, and when it came back it was acting funny. Pretty soon I noticed its stomach was getting bigger and bigger, and I realized it was going to have kittens. Well, I wasn’t going to miss seeing that, so I didn’t let her out of my sight, and finally she had them, five in all, and no bigger than mice. I guess because I was just a kid and learning about the mystery of life and so on, I got pretty excited and I started doing a little dance around the mother and her kittens—silly, I know, but what do you want; I was just a kid—anyway, it turned out to be the worst thing I could have done. I found out later that she probably thought I was going to kill the kittens; that’s why she started taking them in her mouth one by one. At first I thought that was normal enough—she was just going to lick off the sticky stuff or something—but then I realized she was eating them, chewing them up and swallowing them, bit by bit. I yelled and even tried to hit her, but she sank her teeth into my hand. Then I was crying, and terrified, and there was the cat, chewing up the last baby. But for some reason, she couldn’t get it down and she spat it out, half-chewed. It just lay there, not moving.
“I decided I needed some help, so I went to find one of my sisters and told her what had happened. She took the kitten and washed it, but it still wasn’t moving. She said it was no use and that I should bury it, so I wrapped it in some newspaper and put it in a plastic bag; then I went out into the yard to dig a hole—I guess the whole thing took about an hour. Then, just as I was finishing the hole, I thought I heard a noise in the bag, but I went ahead with my little funeral anyway. I was about to put the bag in the hole when it started to move. I opened it up and, sure enough, the kitten was still alive. Well, that kitten grew up to be one tough cat, lorded it over the whole neighborhood, and never lost a fight. In its prime, there were an awful lot of one-eyed dogs in that town…”
“And just what, exactly, is this story supposed to mean?” asked Hashi before D was quite finished.
“Nothing in particular, just that the cat cried and came back to life. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?…”
“So you’re saying I’m like this cat?” said Hashi, his voice getting shrill.
“No need to get all hot and bothered. I was just trying to suggest that the woman who left you in the locker probably didn’t do it because she hated you; she may have done it out of instinct, to protect you—like the cat,” said D.
“Sounds like bullshit to me.”
“Why bullshit?” he objected. “I thought it was a pretty good story.”
“What time of year was all this supposed to happen?” asked Hashi suspiciously. “Winter?”
“No, summer,” said D.
“And what was the name of the cat?”
“Which one?”
“The mother.”
“I called her Peko.”
“And the kitten?”
“It was wild, lived outside, so I never gave it a name.”
“And do you know what made that little cat come back to life and get so strong?”
“I suppose because a lousy start like that made it fight all the harder for something better…”
“Wrong!” said Hashi. “It was hatred, pure and simple.” The fork in his hand dropped to the floor, and with it D’s eyes dropped from Hashi’s face, unable to stand the expression there, one not unlike the mother cat’s as she was eating her kittens. The cook, who had come in with some iced water and persimmons, put a clean fork beside Hashi’s plate.
“I’ll get it later,” she said as he bent to retrieve the other one. D sat staring at the cool, shining fork against the dark floor, wondering whether he should tell Hashi that he was planning a televised reunion with his mother.
“That’s just the way it works,” Hashi continued. “With cats and fish and birds and everything else; they give birth to dozens and dozens of babies, but only a few of them survive, so the babies are born hating the parents that eat them—in fact, resenting everything around them, every little breeze that touches their skin before their eyes are ever open. They’re born despising everything that’s not them—not consciously, of course, they’ve only got those pulpy little brains, but with every cell in their bodies, instinctively. Everything’s dangerous, everything’s hateful. It’s nature, going on without thinking, like people’s hair and fingernails growing for a while after they’re dead… There’s always a little life left… It was summer, wasn’t it? Must have been summer. And the sun was burning hot, unbearably hot, and the heat started his blood pumping, and he couldn’t stand it any longer and he started to wail… and that’s when he came back to life, came back hating his mother… hating everything!”
“Whoa!” D interrupted. “Now who’s telling stories?… Yours?”
“I suppose so,” said Hashi.
No. It was Kiku’s. Suddenly Hashi caught hold of the memory that had been playing around the edges of his brain ever since his fork dug into the tomato… An orphanage field trip, coin lockers like a beehive in front of a roller rink. Maybe little brothers and sisters inside. A red-haired lady, tomatoes everywhere, and Kiku, a furious look on his face, stamping on them… and that sour
smell.
“Is it hate that makes you sing?” asked D.
“No, not really.”
“Then are you trying to forget your hate?”
“Who knows?” said Hashi.
“‘Who knows?’ Nobody, if you don’t. Well, I’ll tell you what I know, I know you’re a spoiled brat. When I listen to kids like you talk, it makes me want to puke; in fact if this weren’t my dining room, I would puke, right here. Seems to me kids today don’t know much of anything. You were born in a world with central heating and air conditioning. You don’t know what it means to be cold or hot. You want everybody to feel sorry for you because you’ve had it so tough, but if you ask me, they spoiled you rotten—that orphanage, your foster parents, everybody. I suppose you could say that for a few minutes, just after you were born, you got a bum deal, but then they put you right in the air conditioning, and you haven’t been out of it since. You can whine your lungs out, but you’re never going to get me to feel sorry for you.”
Taking a gulp of water, Hashi tried to answer, but nothing came out. If he were Kiku, it occurred to him, he would have said something nasty and taken a punch at D long before this. He poked at the steamed tomato with his clean fork, making an effort not to think about the hard layer of muscles covering Kiku’s body. He hates me now anyway, he thought as he dug out a greenish lump from the middle of the tomato and put it in his mouth.
“Like it?” asked the cook, smiling proudly. “I stuffed it with parsley and seaweed.”
D shoveled up half his melting sherbet in one spoonful. The bits of purple ice sizzled as they melted on his tongue.
Back in the city, Hashi was introduced to the stylist D had arranged to work with him, a woman named Neva. She made a series of sketches showing hair, makeup, and costume possibilities and, after consulting at length with D, took Hashi on the rounds. First stop: hair. The salon, in Aoyama, occupied the eighth floor of a building sheathed in black glass. The woman who met them at the door wore alarming, lizardlike eye shadow. In the window, a neon sign flashed the name of the establishment: Marx. One wall was completely covered with Polaroids of famous clients. The rest of the decor was less like a beauty shop than a nineteenth-century parlor, though with quirky touches such as a dark teakwood cabinet displaying antique corsets with impossibly small waists. In the center of the room was an old enamel bathtub doubling as a fountain with a marble sculpture depicting a young mermaid surrounded by dolphins, some sort of thorny plant, and a cloud of soap bubbles. There were only two chairs in the whole place.