by Kōji Suzuki
They’d almost finished threading their way through downtown Odawara to the station when Miyashita muttered, “First thing next week, we’ll get our blood tested.”
Ando didn’t need to ask why, since he’d been thinking the same thing. He had the nasty realization that he’d been transformed from an observer into a participant. All copies of the evil video had vanished, and he hadn’t watched it. He was supposed to be safe, but now that he knew the Ring report had described absolutely everything with preternatural accuracy … He felt like a physician treating an AIDS patient who suddenly found himself infected via a previously unknown route of transmission. Of course, nothing at all had been proven; it was still only a possibility. Yet Ando cowered, for he felt now that his body had indeed been invaded by something. He’d been paralyzed for a good part of the day by the fantasy that something just like the ring virus he’d seen under the electron microscope was spreading through his body beneath the skin, coursing through his veins, violating his cells. No doubt Miyashita was tasting the same fear.
Aside from its author, Asakawa, Ando had been the first person to read Ring. The report described the images on the video minutely. It also described Jotaro Nagao so faithfully that Ando had been able to recognize him at a glance. Naturally, he had to wonder if reading Ring might not have the same effect as watching the videotape.
But he’d read it on November 19th of the past year. Two months had elapsed since then, and nothing had happened to him, at least as far as he could tell. He hadn’t developed a blockage in the coronary artery and died in a week. Had the virus mutated so that the incubation period was longer? Or was he to be merely a carrier of the virus, one who did not display any symptoms himself?
Miyashita was right. They had to get their blood checked first thing next week back at the university. If the ring virus swarmed in them, too, they had to do something quick. Not that Ando had the slightest idea what.
“What do you plan on doing if you’re ring-positive?” he asked dejectedly.
“Well, I won’t just sit on my hands. I’ll think of something to do.” Miyashita spoke in clipped phrases. Ando thought he heard in his friend’s voice overtones of fear even greater than his own. That was as it should be in that Miyashita had family to think of.
They entered the traffic circle in front of Odawara Station, went once around in the passenger-car lane, and then came to a stop. Ando got out of the car and saw Miyashita off with a wave.
We’re in up to our necks now.
For the first time, Ando felt he truly understood what Asakawa had been through. In Ando’s mind he and Miyashita started to blur into Asakawa and Ryuji. Ando corresponded to Asakawa, and Miyashita to Ryuji. Of course, from the physical point of view, and even in terms of personality, Ryuji and Miyashita weren’t overly similar. It almost struck Ando as funny. But he was brought up short when he remembered that Asakawa and Ryuji were both dead. He’d cut open Ryuji himself.
He went through the ticket gate and into the station and sat down on a bench on the platform. The cold back of the bench against his spine, Ando wondered if that was what lying on the autopsy table felt like. If that was what it felt like to be dead. Sometimes it was worse to be in the dark, imagining terrors. He figured that in some ways, it was much more grueling to suspect you had cancer than to be told straight out that you did. The uncertainty was what made it so hard. Directly faced with a trial it was possible to endure it with some measure of equanimity. Something in man made being left hanging the worst. So was he infected, or wasn’t he? For Ando, there was only one way to overcome the misery of the moment, and it was to persuade himself that his life was spent anyway. Regret at having let his son die could help him overcome his own attachment to life …
But as he sat there in the cold on the platform waiting for the Romance Car Express, Ando couldn’t stem his shivering no matter what.
3
He settled himself in a seat on the Romance Car. Now he had nothing to do but stare out the window at the scenery. Usually, he’d turn his attention to a book right about now, but he’d neglected to bring one. That morning as he’d climbed into Miyashita’s car, he hadn’t expected to return by train. Staring at the suburban landscape gradually made him drowsy, and he didn’t fight it. He shut his eyes.
When he opened them again he didn’t know where he was. His pulse quickened with the unease of having been carried off a great distance in his sleep. He thought he could hear his heart beat. He tried to stretch his legs and bumped them into the back of the seat ahead of him; his upper body jerked. He was jostled from beneath by the distinctive vibrations of a train, and he heard the clanging of a railway crossing in the distance.
I’m on a train.
With a sense of relief, Ando recalled that some two hours ago he’d said goodbye to Miyashita in Odawara, where he’d luckily managed to catch an express for Tokyo. That felt like days ago; it seemed like ages since he visited South Hakone Pacific Land with Miyashita. Hakone felt like some far-off land. Only the highland scenery and Jotaro Nagao’s face remained vivid when he shut his eyes.
Ando rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands and then looked out the window again. Nighttime street scenes flowed slowly past. The train was slowing down now as it approached its final destination, Shinjuku Station. Red lights flashed and bells clanged as they crossed streets. He strained his eyes to read the signs as they passed through a station without stopping.
Yoyogi Hachiman. The next station would be Sangubashi, his station. He wished he could just get off there, but the Romance Car Express was skipping all stops before the terminal. He’d have to get off there and get on another train coming back this way, to return two stops. What a pain.
At Yoyogi Hachiman the Odakyu Line tracks made a nearly ninety-degree swerve to run parallel to the dark woods of Yoyogi Park. The scenery was quite familiar to him. He couldn’t see it from where he sat, but his apartment was just over to the right. As they rushed through the station he used every day, Ando pressed his face up against the window to his left and gazed at the platform.
With a start, he turned to press his face harder to the glass. He saw a woman he recognized standing on the platform. Wearing only a blazer, hardly dressed for a winter night, she stood at the edge of the platform, very close to the train as it rushed by, staring at the Romance Car with a nonchalant expression. Although the train was slowing down, figures on the platform flashed in and out of view in an instant. In that mere instant Ando’s eyes and the woman’s had met. He wasn’t imagining it; he could still feel the impact from that moment when their gazes locked.
This was the third time he’d encountered her. The first time, she’d emerged from Mai’s apartment and shared the elevator with him. The second time had been on the top floor of the building where Mai’s body had been discovered. The elevator door had opened and he’d found himself face to face with her. Though he’d only seen her twice, he remembered her face very clearly.
Ten minutes later, at Sangubashi, he got off an outbound train from Shinjuku. At Sangubashi Station, the inbound and outbound tracks were situated in the middle between the two platforms. When the outbound train stopped and he got off, another train was stationed on the inbound tracks. As a result, Ando’s view of the other platform was totally blocked. He struggled against the current of passengers heading for the gates to stay where he was on the platform, waiting for the trains to depart so he could see if the woman was still there on the opposite platform. Though it had been ten minutes and perhaps his desire to see her again was confounding him, Ando was curiously sure she was still there.
Bells rang and both trains pulled away at the same time, like sliding doors opening, revealing a clear view of the opposite platform. In the sudden stillness his eyes met hers again. His hunch had been right. She stood in exactly the same place as before, fixing him with the same steady gaze. Ando returned her gaze and nodded. He was signaling an intention to comply with her instructions.
Ando slowly be
gan to walk toward the gate. Matching his movements, she went down the stairs on her side. They met at the ticket gate.
“We meet again,” she said, as if this were coincidence. Ando didn’t think so. He felt that she’d somehow known he’d pass through Sangubashi Station on that train. She’d been lying in wait for him. But it was no use resisting her charms now that she stood before him. Together they went through the ticket gate and turned into the little store-lined street beyond.
4
When he awoke the next morning, the woman lying next to him immediately asked him to take her to a movie that had just opened. It was the weekend, but as they went to the first showing, the theater wasn’t too crowded.
The woman sat down leaving an open seat between her and Ando. Until they’d entered the theater, she’d been practically hanging from his arm, but now she suddenly wanted to keep her distance. The seats themselves were luxuriously large, so it wasn’t a question of feeling cramped. Ando couldn’t figure it out. But if he started listing everything she’d done that struck him as strange, it’d take him all day. All he knew was that she was Mai’s sister and that her name was Masako.
He stared at the screen, but he couldn’t follow the story. It was partly because he was still sleepy, but more than that, Masako’s presence was distracting him. He remembered meeting her at Sangubashi Station the night before, but he couldn’t quite reconstruct how he’d ended up taking her back to his apartment. He’d invited her to a bar in front of the station, where, over beers, he’d asked her name.
Masako Takano. I’m Mai’s older sister.
Just as he’d guessed. She said she was two years older than Mai; she worked at a securities firm which she’d joined after graduating from a women’s college. Everything after that point was hazy for Ando. He hadn’t drunk that much, but he could only recall fragments. He couldn’t recall who had suggested it, but one way or another, they’d ended up in Ando’s apartment.
In the next scene he could recall, there was running water. In this fragment the context was clear. Masako was in the shower, and Ando was sitting on the bed waiting for her to come out.
The water stopped, and then Masako emerged from the hallway. She turned out the lights without even asking him; that moment, when everything went dark, left a strong impression. A second later, Masako pressed her naked upper body against him. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel, which she held together with her left hand, and with her right, she grabbed Ando’s head and pressed his face against her flesh. He felt sucked into her fine skin; his nose and mouth were covered, and he was starting to smother. It was all he could do to push her away enough for him to breathe. Then he filled his lungs with her fresh scent and put his arms around her …
The movie was unremarkable, so Ando spent the time dredging up bits and pieces of the previous night’s weirdness. He hadn’t been flesh to flesh with a woman for a year and a half. He’d ejaculated three times that he could remember. Not that it gave him any particular pride about his virility. He was about to turn thirty-five, and his managing to do it three times, at least, in one night said more about her beauty than his stamina. Only, now that he thought about it, he realized that everything that had happened in bed last night took place in complete darkness. It didn’t matter how pretty Masako was, or how provocative she may have looked; Ando hadn’t feasted on her with his eyes. Not only had she turned off the lights, but she’d covered the clock on the bedside table with a towel. She’d made the room truly dark, unwilling even to tolerate the faint trace of light coming from behind the face of the clock. Every one of her movements had betrayed an intense attachment to darkness.
Ando was pretending to watch the movie screen, but all the while he was secretly watching Masako. The darkness of the theater set off her beauty even more. Darkness became this woman.
She closed her eyes several times while watching the movie. She wasn’t dozing off; her lips were moving. She appeared to be saying something, but Ando couldn’t make out what. He leaned forward and to the left, resting his elbow on his knee.
Finally, by looking back and forth between her lips and the screen, Ando figured out what she was doing. Masako was repeating the characters’ lines under her breath.
On screen, a bad street girl who had been transformed into a killing machine by a government agency was being sent out on her first mission. In this scene she wore a black dress and carried a huge pistol hidden in her handbag. She was entering a classy restaurant. It was a very tense moment in the film, with lots of rapid-fire dialogue.
Utterly indifferent to the movie, Ando watched Masako as she repeated the heroine’s lines. Then, for a moment, Masako’s voice and the heroine’s overlapped. The movie was in French, with Japanese subtitles, but Masako’s Japanese was perfectly in sync with the heroine’s French. It was like a well-done choral recitation. Ando was shocked to see that sometimes Masako’s mouth opened even before the subtitles appeared. She couldn’t pull off such a feat unless she’d seen the movie enough times to memorize the dialogue.
For a while Masako lost herself in the heroine with a look of happiness on her face that Ando found amusing. But she seemed to feel his eyes upon her and abruptly shut her mouth. She didn’t open it again, just staring at the screen thereafter.
As they left the theater, Masako squinted, stifled a yawn, and took Ando’s arm. The winter sun shone softly, and Ando decided he’d rather touch Masako’s skin directly than link arms with her. He separated his arm from hers and then held her hand. For a moment he felt a chill, but then their skin temperatures evened out, and Masako’s hand relaxed in Ando’s long fingers.
It was Coming of Age Day, and everywhere they looked there were young women dressed up in kimonos. Ando and Masako followed the crowd from Yurakucho toward Ginza. He intended to take her out to lunch, but had no particular place in mind. He planned to choose some likely-looking restaurant as they strolled along.
Masako kept looking around with evident curiosity at the Ginza streetcorners, and now and then she’d let slip a sigh. She didn’t offer much in the way of conversation, but Ando didn’t feel ill-at-ease with her. In fact, he felt a surge of satisfaction at being able to quietly stroll around Ginza on a sunny holiday.
Masako stopped in front of a hamburger joint on a corner and stared at its sign on the sidewalk. There was something of the innocence of a teenager in her earnest gaze.
“You want to eat here?” Ando asked.
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding vigorously. Ando went inside, glad he was getting off so cheaply.
Masako’s appetite was simply astounding. In the blink of an eye she’d consumed two hamburgers and an order of fries, and was eyeing the counter again greedily.
It turned out to be ice cream she wanted now, so he ordered one and gave it to her. This time she ate slowly, as if she dreaded coming to the last bite. She carried each spoonful to her mouth with great care, but even so, she ended up dripping melted ice cream on her lap. Her stockings were flecked with drops of milky white mixed with bits of strawberry. She scooped up a drop with her index finger and licked it, then grew impatient. She clutched her shin with both hands, brought her mouth to her knee, and ran the tip of her tongue over it. Still in her curled-up position, she rolled her eyes and shot Ando a suggestive glance. There was provocation in her eyes, and Ando couldn’t look away. She finished licking up the ice cream and lowered her leg again. There was a run in her new stockings. She must have snagged them with a canine tooth.
Ando had bought her those stockings that morning at a convenience store by the station. She didn’t seem to own any; after all, she’d been walking around with bare legs in the middle of winter. Ando felt cold just looking at her, so he bought a pair of stockings without even checking with her. When he handed them to her she ran straight into a restroom to put them on, and she was still wearing them.
The run seemed to bother Masako, because she kept rubbing her knee.
Ando felt he’d never get tired of watching her eve
ry move. She came out of nowhere, and now I’m falling for her.
He wondered if he really was. Maybe he was just becoming desperate, dissolute. If he’d become a carrier of the ring virus as a result of having read that strange report, if his body was being eaten away by the hour, then his nascent pleasure was something he couldn’t afford to lose.
Back in college, he’d read a novel set in a little mountain village that featured a female character who was rather like the woman he was confronted with now. The fictional woman is possessed of above-average looks, but because she doesn’t speak and act like others, the villagers have branded her as crazy. She ends up providing comfort to men who have no fixed companions. The image of a woman without a home wandering the woods in a disheveled state, accepting the local men one and all without discrimination, embodied a certain high Eros, aided by the exotic setting. The mountain village gave the story a perfect harmony of character and setting, and at the time Ando had felt that if the author had placed such a woman in the city, the novel wouldn’t have acquired the right atmosphere.
Well, he was in Ginza now, smack in the middle of Tokyo, not some alpine hamlet. But Masako had the same aura as the heroine of that book, and her modern beauty didn’t seem at all out of place on a stool in a fast-food joint.
Ando suddenly remembered how the novel ended. Alone in the mountains, the woman gives birth to a child, having no idea who the father is. The story closes with that baby’s first cries piercing the forest and echoing across the mountainside.
I can’t let that happen.
Ando admonished himself. He had to take precautions to protect Masako’s body. He recalled that the night before he’d been so overjoyed at the prospect of coupling that he’d forgotten himself and neglected to use birth control.