by Misumi Kubo
“Could this be Yusuke, do you think?”
In June, when the strong rains had just begun, a classmate of my brother’s named Hinata showed up at our house totally out of the blue. Mom, Dad, and I all craned over to peer at the photo he held out across the table. When I saw it, I came so close to bursting out laughing that I had to quickly cover my mouth with my hand. The picture showed my brother in a white collarless shirt, a long beard covering the lower half of his face, sitting alongside a plain-looking woman wearing no makeup and dressed in similar outfit. I’d never seen him smiling like that before.
“Where is this?” Mom said, practically pouncing at Hinata on the other side of the table, while Dad tried to restrain her. “Where is he?”
“It’s taken at the headquarters of a certain organization, in Nagano.”
Saying this, Hinata took out a book from his green tote bag. Just like the book lying on my brother’s desk, it had a photo of that same shady-looking bearded guy on the cover.
“It was originally the Japanese branch of a religious society based in India. Actually, I was there recently myself to look for someone. I just returned.”
Saying this, Hinata put his thumb and forefinger to the corner of his black-framed glasses and pushed them back up his nose. He wasn’t scruffy like my brother. His hair looked like it was cut regularly at a salon, and though his T-shirt and the nice pink oxford shirt he wore open over it didn’t look desperately expensive, it seemed as if he’d at least gone to the effort of picking out things he liked, and which suited him.
“When you say ‘religious group’. . . Do you mean like a cult? Like the one that let out that poison gas in the metro?” Dad’s face was sharp and serious as he turned to Hinata, who was sitting next to him.
“I don’t know all that much about them, but their way of life doesn’t seem exacting enough for them to qualify as a proper religious organization. There are similarities, for sure, but I don’t think they have any relationship with the cult that caused that catastrophe. They don’t seem to have an active agenda to change the world or anything like that. The only slightly worrying thing is . . .”
Hinata took a sip of the cold barley tea in front of him, darted a look in my direction, and blushed.
“It’s a little hard to talk about with Yusuke’s younger sister in the room.”
He drained the tea in his cup, and Mom topped him up.
“Nana, will you go upstairs, please,” Dad said, looking very stern. Of course, there was no way I was going to go upstairs now but I nodded, stood up, bowed at Hinata, and then went out and shut the living room door. I took off my slippers so they wouldn’t hear my footsteps, then moved as quietly as possible to the kitchen, slid the sliding door leading through to the living room open just a crack, and stood listening.
“I suppose the official description would be Tantrism or something similar. Which is to say, they believe in using orgasms experienced during the sexual act to expand one’s consciousness. They aim to utilize orgasms experienced by multiple men and women to release the energy buried inside all of us. The belief is, that if each individual can progress beyond selfhood in that way, then we may be able to prevent the apocalypse predicted to occur in 2035. That’s the kind of nonsense that they come out with.”
Neither Mom, nor Dad, nor of course I, listening in from the kitchen, had any idea what Hinata was talking about. I couldn’t see my parents’ faces, but I’d have bet anything that they looked totally stunned. Still, Hinata did his best to break it all down for them so that they could understand. He chose his words carefully and spoke slowly, describing in great detail all the things he’d seen back in Nagano. It was like he felt that doing so was a kind of duty on his part, or a mission that he’d been given. He wasn’t really even friends with my brother. I guessed he must just have been a really earnest kind of guy.
“It seems as though, when they’re trying to lure people in, they start out with environmental issues and so on, the kinds of topics students today are interested in. So they do have some kind of theoretical trappings but, speaking frankly, what they actually do inside those headquarters is just lunacy. Since the former group leader was arrested for possession and cultivation of cannabis . . .”
I heard a gulp, which I guessed was probably Hinata taking another big sip of barley tea.
“. . . there’s been a policy of free sex within the facility.”
Now I found myself swallowing desperately. Did “free sex” mean the same thing as an orgy? Like having as much sex as you wanted?
“There are many students who go to Nagano for that reason alone.”
I heard Mom start to weep. I knew it was bad to be thinking this kind of stuff when Mom was clearly in serious shock, but when I imagined my brother, who was always so deathly serious about everything, jumping at the chance to go off and have a bunch of free sex, I couldn’t help grinning. Did that mean Hinata had also been tempted by the same thing?
“When I showed the photos I’d taken in the facility to people back at school, I was told that the person in this photo was Yusuke, and that he’d been missing for a while and everyone was terribly worried. Most students who make the trip out there leave after the first seminar, you see. This person in this photo with him is the current group leader. I believe she’s the wife of the previous group leader, or at least, they’re married by common law. They say it was she who recruited Yusuke . . .”
As Hinata spoke, I pictured the woman in the photo. Her long hair was parted down the middle, she was bare-faced, and she was pretty boring-looking and ugly. It was impossible to tell what age she was.
“They say that if the students don’t have any sexual experience, then she initiates them. Sexually.”
What did that mean, I wondered, to initiate someone sexually? I heard the flick of a lighter, and then cigarette smoke came wafting into the kitchen so I covered my mouth and nose with my hand to make sure I didn’t cough. I figured that if Dad was lighting up without even checking with the people around him if it was okay, he must have been in a real state.
“I don’t really know any concrete details. I just know that her role is to rectify all the mistaken information about sex that men absorb through pornography and so on. She shows them how to touch women, things like that. It’s forbidden within the facility for people to form couples, but I’ve heard that Yusuke and this woman are pretty close. Were pretty close, I should perhaps say, because she’s no longer there. It seems like she just upped and vanished one day. There are rumors she’s gone to either Thailand or India. With its central figure gone, I’m guessing it’ll only be a matter of time before the group disintegrates. It seems like the students with no other place to go are still there, living communally. The neighbors are kicking up a fuss, though, and I think they’ll have to vacate at some point. It seems Yusuke just missed his opportunity to get out and is hanging on. I don’t know him well at all, so I’ve no right to say this, but um . . .”
I heard the scrape of a chair, and for a while there was silence.
“Would you be so good as to go and collect him? I think it’s better just to go, with no advance warning or anything.”
I stood up and peered into the living room through a crack in the door. Hinata was giving Mom and Dad a very low bow. As far as I could see, there really wasn’t any need for him to be pleading with them like that, given the circumstances. Dad urged him to sit down again, while Mom looked again at the grinning photo of my brother and dissolved into sobs.
Around the time the rainy season was ending, Dad brought my brother back home. Dad said he’d got in the car with surprisingly little resistance and then, in a service station nearby, had wolfed down not just one but two big bowls of rice topped with sliced katsu. Before reaching home, Dad took him to a barber, so when he arrived his hair was as closely cropped as that of the kids in baseball club. The car pulled up into our driveway and the two got out, and then, right in front of me and Mom as we were waiting by the door to welcome
my brother home, Dad punched him in the face. He fell to the floor.
“Don’t ever make us worry like that again,” Dad said. Then he got back in the car, and drove off back to his work in Tohoku. Without even bothering to wipe his leaking nose, my brother bowed his head in apology at Mom and me, then ran inside and upstairs to his room, trailing drips of blood.
When I turned on the computer in my room, Akutsu’s email was waiting for me.
“You’d better prepare yourself before looking at these,” she had written, and underneath, pasted a bunch of long URLs. I took a deep breath, then clicked on the first link. The site it took me to was a very ordinary kind of cosplay forum, with lots of photos of people striking poses, dressed up as what I guess must have been anime characters.
Of course, in that world, stuff like white face paint, colored contact lenses, and wigs are not just relatively normal but actually the norm. It took me a while to get used to that, and at first my head felt totally scrambled. I scrolled down, looking at the photos in the order they appeared until I found an image of someone who looked like Takumi in the same kind of purple lab coat as in the photos Akutsu had shown me earlier. When I clicked on it, an even bigger photo appeared. In his wig and his purple lab coat, Takumi was scowling at the camera. I clicked next image and another photo of Takumi appeared, then another. In each one, he was striking a different pose. He definitely looked good in makeup—handsome and well-put-together, a different person from the mopey Takumi I knew. I kept on clicking through the photos, as if in a trance.
When I’d seen them all, I tried out the next link from Akutsu’s list. The bright red title jumped straight out at me: “Watch the DEPRAVED Cosplay Sex of T***Mi S**to from K%£?*@!”
I had no idea who would have made it, but this next one seemed to be a website entirely dedicated to endless photos and videos of Takumi’s cosplay antics. Aware that my brother was in the next room, I plugged my headphones into the computer and clicked on one of the videos. Right away, the sound of moaning flooded into my ears, and I quickly lowered the volume. On the screen appeared a video of Takumi in cosplay, lying on top of some girl and banging away at her like crazy. I could see the girl’s white thighs and knee-high socks, and her skirt, which looked like it was a kind of school uniform. I wondered what high school she was at. Takumi was making little grunts as he moved. His eyes were shut, and he looked like he was enjoying himself. A lot.
Now and then he would reach out for the girl’s boobs, and the girl would call out “Lord Muramasa!” and grasp his arm. Each time Takumi thrust his hips, the girl’s boobs wobbled. I wondered if it was having all that sex with Takumi that had made them so big. Her voice grew louder and louder, and Takumi’s movements faster and faster. At some point I realized I was gripping my own chest really hard with my right hand. In the video, the girl screamed out “I’m commminnnggg!” Lucky cow, I thought, getting to have sex with Takumi like that. My plan had been to just take a look at one of the videos and then call it a day, but I ended up staying up until the middle of the night, watching them all over and over again.
When I drew my curtains in the morning, I saw Yusuke sitting cross-legged on the balcony. Seeing how Mom had tiptoed around him when he’d first came back from the Nagano camp, I’d also made an effort not to say anything that would set him off. Now, though, as I looked at him and thought of how he’d been back two whole months and had stayed in his room the entire time, I started to feel riled up.
“Are you just gonna drop out of college? After everything you did to get in?” I asked.
He didn’t reply. Someone jogging along the bike path glanced up in our direction.
“What are you gonna do? Are you gonna work or what? Couldn’t you at least get a part-time job?”
My brother stayed stock-still, his eyes closed. The sun had disappeared behind a thick wall of cloud, and there was a breeze that felt surprisingly chilly for midsummer.
“Were you in love with that woman in Nagano?”
My brother slowly opened his eyes and turned his head to face me.
“You haven’t been going to the riverbank much lately, have you?”
I didn’t understand what he was saying at first, and I just gawped at him. He went on.
“You know, Nana, even when you believe you are concealed, there is always such a thing as a blind side.”
I felt my cheeks suddenly burning.
“You prick! You’re a total prick!” I said. I picked up a sandal lying on the balcony and hurled it at him. “You’re the biggest prick in the world!” The sandal left a dirty footprint on his white shirtsleeve.
Still livid, I snatched up the lunch box Mom had made for me and headed out to work. When I checked my phone during a break, I saw I had a message from Hinata. Since my brother had returned home, Hinata had started visiting my brother at Dad’s request. When I took coffee and snacks up to my brother’s room, Hinata would blush and avoid my eyes. Sure, Dad had asked him to come, but to actually make good on that—was he some kind of a saint or what? I started to feel more curious about him and asked for his email address. Since then, we’d exchanged messages from time to time.
This message had the subject line how’s work? and it was full of emojis. I read through it, sighed, and threw my phone back into my bag without bothering to reply. Akutsu came into the break room. When she saw the expression on my face, she looked like she wanted to say something, but then the team leader called her and she went off to the locker room. There weren’t many people in the pool today, maybe because it was cool outside. After lunch it began to rain, and the decision was made to close the pool earlier than usual. Takumi hadn’t come to work at all. Just as I was wondering whether to leave my bike where it was in the parking lot and walk home with an umbrella to avoid getting soaked, Takumi’s friend, Ryota, came up to me.
“I’m gonna go around to Takumi’s today. Wanna come?”
I thought for a little before I nodded yes.
Ryota set off in the rain, so I quickly got on my bike and followed his. The fine mist, which reminded me of a steam room, got my face and my clothes entirely wet.
I’d passed Takumi’s house before, but I’d never been inside. If it wasn’t for the sign hung up by the door saying SAITO MATERNITY CLINIC, nobody would ever guess this old two-story wooden house provided some kind of medical service. In the entranceway, shoes, sneakers, and kids’ sandals were strewn across the concrete floor. Ryota kicked off his flip-flops and went inside, heading quickly down the long hallway, and I did the same. I could hear a noise that sounded like a woman screaming.
“Hello? Mrs. Saito?” Ryota called out at the sliding door, and a woman’s voice shouted, “Hold on a minute!”
From beyond the screen I could hear panting and, in between, cries of pain. After a while, a woman who I guessed must have been Takumi’s mom slid open the door. Through the gap, I caught a glimpse of a pregnant woman wearing just a T-shirt, her legs spread open wide like a frog’s. Leaning back against the man behind her who was holding her up, she was heaving these great long breaths that made her shoulders rise and fall and moaning loudly. Her black pubic hair and the reddish-black part below glistened as if they’d had water poured over them. Without thinking I looked away, as if I’d seen something I shouldn’t.
“You’re soaked through!” Mrs. Saito said, looking at me as she closed the sliding screen behind her.
She was tall and thin, and her eyes were a little like Takumi’s. I bowed to her.
“Are you Ryota’s girlfriend?” she grinned, fine creases forming at the corner of her eyes.
“As if!” Ryota said. “This is Nana. She’s in our class. We’re gonna go see Takumi, okay?”
“He hasn’t left the room all day. Again. What a foolish boy, eh? Who knows what he’s playing at.”
Saying that, she plucked a couple of towels from a lidded wicker basket in the hall and handed one each to me and Ryota. “You’ll catch a chill if you stay soaked like that. Here, dry yourselv
es off.”
The woman inside the room let out a loud scream: “AAAAGGGGHHHH!”
“I’m busy right now, so just make your own way up, okay? Help yourselves to ice cream or juice or whatever from the fridge,” she said, then rushed back inside the room.
With a very familiar air, Ryota made his way inside the kitchen near the front door of the house, took out three cans of tangerine juice from the big fridge, and handed one to me.
What I’d seen back there in that room had been my first-ever glimpse of childbirth, and I was in shock. I stood there, holding the can of juice in one hand, staring at the floor. Realizing the state I was in, Ryota said, “If you’re not prepared for it, it can really knock you for a loop, right?” Then he drained the juice in one go, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
I followed him up a narrow, steep flight of stairs. He knocked on the door of the room closest to the stairwell.
“Hey, I’m coming in.” Ryota opened the door. I saw Takumi lying on his side on a bed beside the window. “I brought Nana with me.”
Takumi didn’t move an inch. He wore a slightly grubby-looking white T-shirt with black shorts, and his legs poking out of them looked very thin. His room was smallish, with a tatami floor, the single bed by the window taking up half of it. The rest of the floor space was strewn with manga and CDs, leaving no room to stand. I quickly glanced around to check there weren’t any cosplay outfits or figurines of anime characters in view.
“It’s boiling in here,” Ryota said, jumping up onto Takumi’s bed and opening the window.
I saw his foot trample Takumi’s shin, and Takumi let out an “Ow!”
“Do you want some juice?” Ryota asked, holding the can against Takumi’s neck.
“Shit!” Takumi said, sitting up. “That’s cold.”
Cackling to himself, Ryota sat down at the end of the bed, stretched out a foot to press the high button on the fan with his toe, and opened the can of juice he’d held to Takumi’s neck. Takumi and I watched in silence as Ryota drained the juice in what seemed like a second.