by Aoko Matsuda
As I waited for the conditioner to sink in, I inspected my arms one at a time, both hair-free as a result of that day’s treatment. You see, Auntie? See how good they look? As I stroked each arm in turn, I felt the tears run down my cheeks. I hurriedly turned the shower on my face to conceal them.
The thing was, my aunt was absolutely right, and I knew it. Being hairless didn’t get you anywhere. It didn’t change a single thing. What an idiot I’d been! All those stupid, selfish things he’d come out with, like how his feelings for the other woman had “grown.” Had he been gauging his feelings with a measuring tape or something? And what did I go and say in response? “Well, I guess these things happen.” What a weed! At the very least I should have gotten angry. If I’d just thought about it, I’d have seen that everything he was saying was a load of shit, but instead I just bore it as best I could. And why? Why? Had I been brain-washed or what?
One after another, the little boxes where my memories had been stored had their lids flipped open, and the memories came together to form a black, hazy mass.
I’m coming, the black mass told me, as it swelled larger and larger. I opened more boxes. I kept on opening them, but there were always more. Still more. I groped around blindly, feeling every last one. I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m on my way, the black mass kept telling me. Not many left to go now; I had nearly unearthed them all. I could hear the blackness clamoring, the blackness I knew to be the accumulation of all the sadness and rage and frustration and emptiness and idiocy I’d been storing up inside my body. Just three left to go, no, four, now three, two, and this, this is the last box right here. I’m coming, announced the mass, right underneath my skin, so close that its voice struck me right between the shoulders. I’m coming, and then the black force overtook me, propelling itself out of my body.
Feeling a strange sensation beneath my palms, I opened my eyes and looked down. My thighs were black. Through the steam on the surface of the mirror opposite me, I could make out something that looked like a black demon. I touched my face. It felt no different from the hair on my head. My limbs, my torso, every single part of my body was covered with hair, from head to toe. Glossy, pitch-black hair, not a single split end or damaged strand. There was no trace left of my perm, either.
Before I knew it, I was standing with my arms stretched out in front of me, staring at myself in rapture. To know that all along my body had contained hair this strong, this black, this magnificent was an amazing thing—I was an amazing thing!
Glancing around, I discovered that the women in the bathhouse were staring at me with a mixture of alarm and curiosity. And with good reason: it must have seemed to them like a hairy monster of unknown origin had materialized out of nowhere.
Uh-oh, I thought. I stood up quickly and ran to the door. The stool I’d been sitting on clattered onto its side behind me. In the changing room, as the women around me screamed and whimpered, I retrieved my bag from my locker as casually as I could. I left the bathhouse quietly and turned down a deserted shopping street, running as fast as my legs would carry me. My steady pace and the night breeze worked together like a hair dryer, draining the moisture from the hair that covered my body. It felt good. Really good.
When I got back home, I stood in front of my full-length mirror, staring at the mystery creature in front of me: neither bear nor ape, but some other being entirely, covered head to toe in glossy, slightly damp hair. The hair looked a bit like that of Sadako from The Ring, although it was only about half the length of hers. Actually, when I thought about it, I came to the realization that Sadako was a pretty impressive character. Not only could she emerge from wells, she could also come out of the TV set. Now, that was a special trick! And the same went for Okiku, Oiwa, and all the other famous ghosts I could think of. They all deserved credit. The ability to appear as a ghost was proof of an iron will.
Something terrible startled me out of my reverie. On both my arms, just where I’d had the permanent hair removal done, was a patch of hair much thinner than the rest and clearly much weaker. In terms of strength, shine, body—it was inferior in every way. What had I gone and done? Another anxious thought followed. Transforming into a monster was all very well, but what on earth was I supposed to do now?
My program of hair fortification began the following morning.
I have started eating as much liver and seaweed as I can. Beans and eggs are supposed to be good, too. As I massage horse oil over the damaged patches on my arms, I repeatedly apologize to the follicles. Naturally, I apply the oil to other parts of my body, too.
Now that I’ve developed an understanding with the black mass inside me, I can retract it at will, so it doesn’t interfere with my work. Just like my colleagues who spend their free time taking courses or pursuing various leisure activities, I pour my energy into fostering the power of my hair.
Every day before bed, I transform in order to assess how my hair is coming along. Then I brush it thoroughly, using a luxury boar-bristle brush. I don’t know how much of it is the work of the horse oil, but the weak patches on my arms are now almost indistinguishable from the rest of me, so I’ve started pondering what my next move should be. I haven’t reached any conclusions.
I’m going to keep mulling it over until I land on a way to put my hair to good use—until I can devise my own unique trick. In the meantime, I intend to keep taking good care of it. That way, when the opportunity arises for me to unleash my power in a dramatic fashion like Kiyohime, I’ll be able to rise to the occasion. Kiyohime was free of hair and I am full of it, but I think our ambitions are the same. I want a skill, a special power into which I can throw my whole self. As to the question of what kind of creature I am, I really couldn’t care less. It doesn’t bother me if I stay a nameless monster.
My aunt hasn’t shown up to see me yet, so I guess she hasn’t managed to perfect her special trick. I’m sure that whatever she comes up with will be unspeakably brilliant. I really hope she comes back soon. Until then, I’ll keep working on myself, always holding at the forefront of my mind the image of my aunt and myself, dancing together, kimonos twinkling.
The Peony Lanterns
“Good evening to you, sir!”
He’d ignored the doorbell three times already when he heard the woman’s voice carrying through the thick steel door. Sitting on his sofa, Shinzaburō froze in alarm, hardly breathing. His body felt terribly heavy, and the thought of getting up was unbearable. Usually in this situation, Shinzaburō would have relied on his wife to answer the door, but with it being Obon, she was away visiting her parents. Besides, it was ten o’clock at night. Shinzaburō had no idea who his visitor was, but he believed that ringing people’s doorbells at this hour was unreasonable behavior—and Shinzaburō disliked people who behaved unreasonably. From a young age, he had been instilled with a firm grasp on what was and wasn’t reasonable. In his adult life, throughout his career as a salesperson, his professional conduct had always been eminently reasonable. Even when he’d been laid off as part of the company’s post-recession restructure, he had retained his sense of reason and walked away without a fuss.
That had been more than six months ago. Shinzaburō’s wife had begun dropping gentle hints that he should find himself another job. He knew she was right—but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Both his mind and body felt leaden. Whenever he browsed job listings online he was hit by the unshakable sense that he was being made a fool of, and he couldn’t stand the idea of visiting the employment bureau either. Had he really become the sort of man who had to rely on an employment bureau? The very idea seemed too wretched to bear. And there he’d been believing that he was talented and had something to offer the world. He’d gone about his life not being a nuisance to anyone, playing by the rules, acting reasonably at all times. How had it come to this?
While his wife was at work, Shinzaburō would do a bit of housework, but a token offering was as far as it went. The truth of the matter was this: spending all his time in hi
s marl-gray tracksuit, shabby from constant wear, Shinzaburō had morphed into a big gray sloth. In the afternoon, he would lounge about on the sofa, watching reruns of period dramas and mulling over questions of no particular significance, like whether, back in the Edo period, his lack of fixed employment would have made him a rōnin. How much better that sounded than simply unemployed.
“Good evening to you, sir!”
The same voice again. From the light filtering through the living room curtain, it must have been obvious to whoever was outside that there was someone at home.
“Oh, damn it all!”
Shinzaburō got up from the sofa, slowly crept toward the door to avoid his presence being discovered—though he knew from long years of experience that such a thing was impossible—and peered through the peephole.
Outside the gate stood two women. They were dressed in practically identical outfits: black suits, white shirts, sheer tights, and black pumps. One was somewhere between forty and fifty, and the other looked to be in her early thirties. The elder was staring with terrifying intensity at the peephole, while the younger was shyly inspecting her feet. They made for an altogether peculiar pair. Immediately, alarm bells went off in Shinzaburō’s head. No one in his right mind would involve himself in a situation he knew would be troublesome from the outset. In this particular period of his life, Shinzaburō did not have the mental energy to spare on that kind of nonsense.
The women seemed to sense Shinzaburō’s presence in his cramped entranceway, and the elder one piped up again. “Good evening to you, sir!”
Shinzaburō guessed she must be the one who had done all the speaking so far. The younger one kept her head down, not moving a muscle. Something about the way she held one cheek angled toward the door suggested she was invested in what the person on the other side thought of her. Indeed, the way she carried herself was common among highly self-conscious women, thought Shinzaburō. The observational skills he had cultivated during his years as a sales representative, which enabled him to pick up on these little details about people, were a source of great pride to him.
Very cautiously, Shinzaburō opened his mouth. “Yes, what is it?”
“Oh, good evening, sir,” began the elder woman with an affected smile on her face. “We are door-to-door sales representatives, visiting the homes in this area in the best of faith. We are terribly sorry to disturb you at this hour, but we were wondering if you might be able to spare us a couple of minutes of your time.”
Something about the woman’s voice filled Shinzaburō with instantaneous exhaustion. He felt nothing but loathing for these stupid women who’d invaded his precious relaxation time and forced him to walk all the way to the front door. Don’t you know that I’m exhausted? he wanted to say. For six whole months now, I’ve been totally and utterly exhausted.
“No, thanks, I’m afraid not. It’s late.”
No sooner had Shinzaburō delivered his curt answer, which he had hoped would make them go away, than the younger one, who had been examining the floor so intently, raised her head to look toward the peephole, and said in a weak, sinuous voice, “Come now, don’t be so inhospitable! Open up!”
If a willow tree could speak, Shinzaburō thought, this is the kind of voice it would have. He blinked and found himself in the living room, the two women facing him across the coffee table. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they were sitting on the sofa, while Shinzaburō had been relegated to one of the more uncomfortable kitchen chairs he and his wife had bought online. He had no memory of carrying it into this room. Sandwiched beneath his buttocks was one of the Marimekko cushions his wife loved so much. Shinzaburō still had no idea what its pattern was supposed to represent, although right now that was hardly his most pressing concern.
While Shinzaburō was still wondering how on earth he had wound up here, the women sat looking at him, their four stockinged kneecaps arranged into a perfect row of iridescent silver. Seeing that they had his attention, they both pulled the same inscrutable expression and handed him business cards as white as their papery faces.
“Allow us to introduce ourselves.”
Flummoxed by being handed two cards at exactly the same time, Shinzaburō somehow managed to accept both and examined the names printed on them. The elder woman was Yoneko Mochizuki, the younger Tsuyuko Iijima.
Just then, Shinzaburō’s eyes fell on three steaming cups of green tea placed on the coffee table. Did I go and make tea without realizing it? he thought. Surely these two didn’t sneak into the kitchen and make it themselves? What’s more, he noticed that the yōkan he’d been saving for a special occasion was there too, cut into neat slices. As Shinzaburō was trying to wrap his head around all this, Yoneko spoke.
“We took the liberty of examining the nameplate outside your door. It’s Mr. Hagiwara, is that right? Oh, good. Forgive our impertinence, but may we ask your first name?”
Why did they need to know? “It’s Shinzaburō,” he found himself saying, though he’d had no inclination to answer the question. It was as if his mouth was moving of its own accord.
“Shin-za-bu-rō,” Tsuyuko pronounced slowly.
Having his first name spoken like that by someone he’d only just met made him shudder. It was much too intimate.
“It’s an absolute pleasure to make your acquaintance, Shinzaburō.”
Between this woman’s honeyed tone and her flirtatious manner, there was definitely something overfamiliar about her. Shinzaburō averted his eyes. Did she think her looks would allow her to get away with such behavior? Sure, with her alabaster skin, her hair lustrous as a raven’s coat, and all those coquettish sideways glances, she was undoubtedly beautiful. And yet, despite all these gifts, the epithet that seemed to fit Tsuyuko like no other was misfortunate.
Without waiting for an invitation, Tsuyuko took a sip of tea from her cup, leaving a sticky red lipstick mark on its rim. It came to Shinzaburō in a flash that as far as sales work was concerned, this woman was probably utterly incompetent. The same went for her companion, too.
“Well, if you don’t mind, we’ll get down to business,” said Yoneko, projecting her gray-haired head forward like a tortoise emerging from its shell. Shinzaburō nodded reluctantly, resolving to hear out their patter and then get them to leave. Changing the key of her already gloomy expression so it was positively funereal, Yoneko began to speak.
“Miss Tsuyuko here has had the most lamentable of lives, Mr. Hagiwara. She was born into a family of great repute and prestige, and yet here she is now, as you see, working all day long as a mere saleswoman. The cause of this tragic downfall was that her beloved mother passed away at a young age, leaving poor little Tsuyuko behind. Her father was a kind man, but rather weak of character, and it wasn’t long before he developed an intimate relationship with the maidservant. As sad as it is to admit, it would appear that there are a great many weak-willed men out there. As for the maidservant, well! I know that of late people take leaks of personal information and so forth awfully seriously, but we do so much wish you to hear this story in its entirety, so I will on this occasion divulge that her name is Kuniko. Now, Mr. Hagiwara, we do most earnestly beseech you to exercise the utmost caution around women going by the name of Kuniko. For the thing is, you see, this Kuniko utilized her feminine wiles to claw her way to the stature of second wife. As if that wasn’t enough, she then resolved to gain sole possession of Tsuyuko’s father’s fortune, and began spoon-feeding him all kinds of groundless fabrications about Tsuyuko, morning and night . . . he was not a man of strong character. Honestly, men like that really are the worst, aren’t they, Mr. Hagiwara? Anyhow, predictably enough, he foolishly believed every word that Kuniko spouted, and began to look coldly upon his daughter. Unable to bear this cruel treatment, Tsuyuko left home without even finishing high school. Her life from that point on has been one tear-inducing episode after another. To start—”
“Sorry, but why are you telling me all this?” Shinzaburō finally broke in on her lament. For
a long time, he had been stunned into silence by Yoneko’s phenomenal pace of speaking, which would have rivaled that of any rakugo performer, but eventually he managed to find his opening. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
At this obviously unexpected interruption, a look of unbridled annoyance flashed across Yoneko’s face, but she continued with a cool expression. “It has nothing to do with you personally, Mr. Hagiwara, but the fact that we have met in this way implies some kind of indelible connection between us. It’s Miss Tsuyuko’s heartfelt wish that you hear her story.”
Tsuyuko nodded in agreement, dabbing her tears with a white handkerchief that had miraculously appeared in her hand.
“You came barging in here! Does that qualify as an ‘indelible connection’? Besides, you’re acting very oddly, if you don’t mind me saying so! First, you said you were here as sales representatives, and now you’re here telling me your life story! Don’t you think that’s a bit inappropriate?”
As Shinzaburō began to lay down the laws of reason to these two utterly unreasonable women, they met him with expressions of genuine incomprehension.
“What exactly is wrong with that?”
“Now look here,” said Shinzaburō. “Don’t feign ignorance with me. I used to be a salesman too, so I know the score. Forcing your way into people’s houses and then acting like this is just not how it’s done.”
“Oh, Mr. Hagiwara! So you were in the sales industry too! Well, that only proves our indelible connection. Isn’t that just wonderful, Tsuyuko?”
“Oh yes, Yoneko!”
Shinzaburō looked on in horror as the two beamed at each other.
“But Mr. Hagiwara, your use of the past tense suggests you’ve given the profession up. Forgive my impertinence, but why is that? Would it be anything to do with restructuring, which has become so common in the business world of late?” Yoneko cocked her head and stared pointedly at Shinzaburō. This person was utterly unsuited to sales, Shinzaburō thought. Most likely she hadn’t even been through training. In his incredulity, he found himself answering her question without ever having meant to.