Death and the Flower

by Kōji Suzuki

  The space for his name still blank, Yoshiaki looked up. He desperately tamped down his agitation and assumed an air of nonchalance.

  “This film …” he managed before words failed him.

  Perplexed, Kodama tilted his head. “What about this film?”

  If the system hadn’t changed for the last ten years, Kodama only developed black-and-white photos himself and outsourced color processing to a center in the suburbs.

  “Hey, what’s the problem?” Kodama pressed.

  “Who brings these films to the processing center?”

  Kodama stood there absentmindedly for a moment, unable to grasp the point of the question. “Who? That would be a man named Hikuma.”

  “Hikuma? What’s his first name?”

  “I don’t remember. He’s a part-timer with Crown Color, so I really don’t know much about him.”

  Shiba Photo and Crown Color had a contract going for more than ten years. Even back when Yoshiaki worked there, a worker from Crown Color came by to pick up the negatives every morning around 9:00 a.m. Back then, it was a university student enrolled in night classes; he collected the undeveloped film from several stores in Minato Ward, took them to the processing center in Nishi Funabashi via the Tozai subway line, and waited for them to be developed. The pictures were ready around 4:00 p.m., and the photographs and negatives had to be returned to each store by five. That way, customers who dropped off their film at 9:00 a.m. could receive their order by after 5:00 p.m. the same day. Color film, including rolls dropped off at convenient stores, were generally processed at locations on the outskirts of Tokyo. All processing centers relied on part-time workers to pick up and return the film and photos. If the delivery person used the subway each way, there was plenty of time to take a look at the developed pictures. And each envelope bore the customer’s phone number.

  “Since when has this Hikuma person been coming here?”

  “Just started this year. I think it was around the beginning of February.”

  February.

  The first prank calls to the Naka Meguro apartment had occurred between February and March.

  “What about today?”

  “Sorry, he’s already come by, so these pictures won’t be ready until tomorrow. Is that all right?”

  Naturally, the photos wouldn’t be ready until the next day if one missed the nine o’clock pick-up.

  “Hm? Oh, sure, that’s no problem.”

  There was no rush. Today or tomorrow, as long as he got the photos it was fine, but the fact that he had just missed the prank caller gave Yoshiaki mixed feelings. He wanted to identify the man right then and there, but at the same time he felt a little relieved.

  Just seeing you pisses me off.

  He could almost hear the man’s singular speech echoing in the small shop. Yoshiaki wanted to hear him say the same thing in person to confirm it. Just one word would do. He’d know immediately if he heard that voice again.

  “He’s coming again at nine tomorrow, right?” Yoshiaki asked to make sure.

  “Yeah. He always comes at nine on the dot.”

  Yoshiaki tried to smile at Kodama but couldn’t quite make his face cooperate. A twitch below one eye ruled out any friendly expression. He could tell that the aggravation roiling in his chest was coloring his visage.

  “All right, see you later.”

  He quickly turned away, opened the glass door, and left.

  Kodama started to say something, but Yoshiaki pretended not to notice and continued walking towards his office.

  Calm down.

  His pace quickened as if to match his racing heartbeat, and his sweating noticeably worsened.

  9

  It was an especially tiring day. Yoshiaki had appointments with three clients from the afternoon into the evening, and by the time he finished up some leftover work at the office, it was already past nine. He declined a colleague’s invitation to mahjong, told the section head that he was taking a day off tomorrow, and left for home in a hurry.

  He got off the train at Hiyoshi station. Finding he couldn’t tolerate his thirst any longer, he bought a can of coffee from a vending machine on the walk home. His building was a stone’s throw away. As he drank his coffee, he glanced over to the third floor and checked to see if the lights were on in their apartment. Apparently the curtains were drawn, but no light spilled from between the gaps. His wife and daughter were probably already asleep. Yoshiaki had told Eriko time and again not to stay up waiting for him to return from work.

  The space where his wife and daughter slept seemed to float on that corner of the quiet residential area. Yoshiaki finished his coffee, never once taking his eyes off of the corner.

  He showered as noiselessly as possible and crawled into the futon laid for him in the Japanese-style room.

  His daughter often slept in a crib, but tonight she was breathing evenly next to her mother. Recently, the family of three shared two futons—mom and dad on either side with baby Aya in the middle. It felt right for both Eriko and Yoshiaki.

  Though physically drained, having come so close to unveiling the prank caller Yoshiaki was too restless to sleep. He’d taken the following day off from work to check out the lead. What he’d do once he discovered the man was still a question mark, but when he thought of how tortuous the last two months had been, he knew he wouldn’t be satisfied without exacting revenge.

  Perhaps woken by his turning over, Eriko shifted. “Welcome home,” she whispered right by his ear.

  Their daughter slept sucking on her thumb. A short, quiet conversation didn’t seem likely to wake her.

  “Sorry. Did I wake you?”

  “It’s fine. I took a nap with her during the day.” Eriko laughed, but her “nap” couldn’t have been much more than a quick doze at the infant’s side.

  “Do you know a man named Hikuma?” Despite his reluctance about asking her, the name leapt unchecked from his mouth.

  “Hikuma?”

  “Yeah.”

  Eriko tucked the fleece blanket around her hips and repeated the name. “Hikuma, Hikuma …” The room was dim with only a single small bulb lighting the room. The air was humid. “That Hikuma?” she exclaimed, her voice colored with surprise.

  The length it took for her to remember, the nuance of familiarity … They must have known each other from ages ago.

  “You know him?”

  There was no answer. Yoshiaki raised his head partway and glanced over at the adjacent futon. Eriko had covered her cheeks with both hands and was staring at the ceiling, her large double-lidded eyes blown even wider.

  “Oh, God. It was Hikuma?” Tears fell from her eyes as she spoke.

  “Who the hell is he?”

  “Hey, are you sure it’s Hikuma making those calls?”

  “Dammit, who is he?”

  “Ah ha, I see … That’s why.”

  Between them, the baby moved in her sleep. Yoshiaki and Eriko both held their breaths and fell silent. They hadn’t realized their voices had grown louder.

  After a brief pause, Yoshiaki explained in whispers how he’d dropped off some film at Shiba Photo that morning. He told her how access to the photos supplied info equivalent to peeping into their home and how the envelope had a space for the customer’s phone number. He told her that the part-time delivery person was a man by the name of Hikuma.

  “So that’s it.” Eriko was sobbing.

  “Please, tell me, who on earth is this Hikuma?”

  Eriko began haltingly. She spoke of an episode of bullying in junior high, something everyone experiences in one form or another. Some bullying victims turn to suicide, while others simply start skipping school. In Eriko’s case, being bullied caused a psychological condition called hypochondria. Hypochondria … Yoshiaki had never thought of it as a diagnosis. Eriko told him her hypochondria had brought on temporary hearing loss.

  In the second semester of freshman year in junior high, upon her father’s death, Eriko had to transfer from a schoo
l in Yokohama to a public school in her mother’s hometown in the countryside. A good student with a sharp sense of justice, she had earned the role of class representative at her Yokohama junior high, but after transferring, being unfamiliar with the new environment she kept a low profile. A handful of guys, the class bullies, picked on Eriko for being from a big city. She wasn’t targeted for being unattractive; instead, the bullies were apparently incensed that she was a goodie-two-shoes with a conceited, urban style. Since she was tough, rather than grow timid she snapped back at the bullies, telling them to knock it off. This only served to aggravate them. If she’d simply held her mouth for just a while until the boys moved on to another target, her life might have turned out completely differently.

  After that incident, the bullies escalated their attacks. Without reason, they would shove and poke her face and head, hide her belongings, trip her, and put chalk dust on her cafeteria lunch calling it “powdered cheese.” Not a day would go by without them hurling abuse at her: germ, ugly, fattie, die.

  “Wasn’t there anyone to protect you?” Yoshiaki interrupted, unable to stand it any longer.

  Eriko, still looking upwards, shook her head. Yoshiaki only heard the scraping against the pillow. “I had a few friends who were nice to me in the beginning, but afraid of the bullies, they all left me in the end.”

  “What about your teachers?”

  “They told me to deal with it on my own.”

  Children’s worlds are extremely narrow, and school is often their only social environment. How was she, ostracized and alone, supposed to deal with it?

  Yoshiaki stretched an arm over his slumbering daughter’s head and placed his hand on Eriko’s shoulder, caressing her arm and giving it a strong squeeze.

  She continued her story.

  It was after the bullies spread a terrible rumor about Eriko that her body, particularly her sensory organs, chose to act up. All she had to do, as long as they were just poking her head, was endure the pain. After the rumor started, however, her feelings of alienation and humiliation reached the breaking point.

  “Everyone says she got an abortion.”

  Her classmates were spreading the rumor. The number of her supposed pregnancies grew from one to two, then to three times, and soon she was labeled a whore who spread her legs for anyone. The originators of the rumor were no mystery. Suddenly, one day, her ear shunned the rumors.

  Perhaps because the gang of bullies sat behind her on her right side, her right ear was the first one to go deaf. She had probably unconsciously tried to shut out any and all sounds from entering her ears. Being called things like “slut” and “whore” day in and day out shattered her pride, causing her hearing, and later even her vision, to fail.

  “My ears would ring deep inside, and only the light drained out of everything I saw. It was like having a sheet of dark cellophane over my eyes …”

  Yoshiaki recalled the only time he’d ever fainted, due to a bout of anemia, in the schoolyard of his elementary school. He still remembered the way light seemed to drain away during the split second before he fell. He thought it had to be a similar sensation as he tried to imagine Eriko’s symptoms. For him, it had been momentary. As soon as the world seemed to change colors, he fainted, and after that was a blank. But for Eriko, the symptoms reoccurred over a prolonged period.

  In the end, she could no longer attend school and spent each day holed up at home when she wasn’t seeing a psychiatrist. Once the situation had reached that point, the school finally took action, calling the bullies into the principal’s office for a thorough scolding. That, however, perversely served to incur the bullies’ wrath. Soon they started calling her at home.

  “You’re just pretending you can’t hear,” they’d jeer.

  Eriko never tried to go back to school.

  The leader of the boys who had bullied Eriko and severely derailed her life was named Hikuma.

  Puberty had probably rendered his voice unrecognizable to Eriko, which was why she hadn’t realized the identity of the prank caller. Or maybe deep in her consciousness she did—hence the renewed signs of hypochondria and temporary loss of hearing.

  When Yoshiaki proposed to Eriko four years ago, he was deeply shocked to learn that she only had a junior high education. He assumed there was some special reason since he knew her as a capable nutritionist with a job at a university hospital, but he never thought to needle her about the specifics. That mystery was now solved.

  Even though Eriko refused to take any more classes, the junior high was considerate enough to grant her a diploma. Nonetheless, she gave up on the idea of getting into a high school and chose instead to attend a vocational school to become a nutritionist. As if to mend her wounded spirit, she hit the books hard and graduated with excellent grades. Yoshiaki and Eriko met when she was already working as a nutritionist at the hospital where he mistook her for a nurse during his stay after an accident.

  His first impression of her was that she was smart. She had read a fair number of novels that were generally considered abstruse and got along well with Yoshiaki who’d graduated from a private university with a degree in literature. They shared similar tastes in music and movies, and he couldn’t seem to get enough of her. The only thing that bothered him was her tendency to withdraw into herself at certain moments and the fact that she stubbornly refused to open up in a real way. Now the extent of the darkness she carried inside her heart had been laid bare.

  Although she couldn’t weep out loud with the baby right beside her, she continued to let out sobs. Her humiliation in junior high had come rushing back, and what she’d held in check deep inside her heart was pouring out like water from a broken dam.

  Stroking her shoulder, Yoshiaki allowed the flood to run its course. “I’m taking the day off tomorrow.”

  Eriko simply responded with nods and didn’t venture to ask her husband why.

  10

  Nearly four hours had passed since 9 a.m. when Yoshiaki started observing Hikuma. During those four hours, Yoshiaki had followed him at a reasonable distance and observed every detail he could. He felt as if he were peering into the life Hikuma had led up to then. The balance of information had been totally upset, giving Yoshiaki the advantage, which delighted him. At this point he could even identify a habit Hikuma had when he smoked.

  Yoshiaki’s initial plan was to wait for Hikuma at Shiba Photo at nine that morning, listen to him speak a few words to Kodama, and confirm that he was indeed the prank caller. Surprisingly, though, Hikuma hadn’t said a word while he was at the shop. While Yoshiaki pretended to look for a disposable camera with his back to Hikuma, Kodama and the part-timer wordlessly exchanged the envelopes of film. After Hikuma stuffed them into a shoulder bag and left the store, Yoshiaki hastily followed him. He bought the same ticket as Hikuma at the subway station, and when transferring from the Toei Line to the Tozai Line, Yoshiaki was cautious enough to board the next car over, keeping an eye on Hikuma’s profile from across the connector. He’d come all the way to Nishi Funabashi where the processing center was located. He was finding his unplanned turn as private eye downright exhilarating. While Hikuma wasn’t likely to recognize his face just from the photos, staying out of his mark’s direct line of sight was thrilling.

  After getting off at Nishi Funabashi station, Hikuma slung his bag across his bony shoulder and started off on the ten-minute walk to the processing center. The bag held several dozen rolls of films he’d collected from photo shops around Shiba. Perhaps due to his sloping shoulders, Hikuma kept shifting the bag between his left and right sides. He looked thin and scrawny from behind. Since he’d been Eriko’s classmate, he had to be twenty-nine. He was nearly as tall as Yoshiaki, but his arms and legs were extremely skinny and his shoulders were very narrow. He held himself ramrod straight and had a peculiar way of walking, taking short strides and dragging his feet. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with vertical stripes and a pair of beige khakis. He had long hair and darkish skin and didn’t
wear glasses.

  The six hours between the drop-off and pick-up at the processing center was free time. Hikuma walked back towards the station and killed over an hour at a pachinko parlor. He probably didn’t have much money to play with; once he realized the machines he’d chosen were a total bust, he stood diagonally behind one that was on a roll and glared stickily at the back of the customer working it. Standing at the entrance and watching Hikuma’s profile, Yoshiaki tried to imagine what was going through the man’s mind. The machines I chose were no good, but the guy right in front of me has filled two large boxes already … Was staring at such a sight an expression of mere envy, or was he trying to glean clues for winning by observing the path of the silver balls? The latter didn’t seem to be the case as Hikuma’s stare was concentrated on the back and hands of the fortunate customer.

  It was ten minutes to one. It had been four hours since a whim had set Yoshiaki on this chase. Hikuma bought a racing newspaper from a kiosk and was slurping soba at a noodle stall in the station. Yoshiaki stood in the shadow of the kiosk and pretended to read a newspaper, glancing occasionally at Hikuma’s back.

  With the racing newspaper tucked under his arm, Hikuma exited the noodle stall. Perusing the folded paper, he retrieved a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one with a lighter. He’d already smoked over ten cigarettes since that morning. Judging by his current pace, he smoked two or three packs a day.

  He held the newspaper close to his face with his left hand and dangled the cigarette from his right as he walked through the sparse crowd in front of the bay of ticket machines. He walked with his eyes on the paper, not paying any attention to where he was going. Sometimes he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, exhaled smoke, and lowered his hand again, all the while approaching the kiosk where Yoshiaki was hiding.

  In between them, a woman had stopped pushing her stroller and was retrieving her wallet from her purse. She left the stroller, in which a child of about two was dozing off, and walked towards the ticket machines. It happened right as she was feeding coins to a machine to buy a ticket. As Hikuma walked past, not bothering to look where he was going, his right hand brushed the face of the child in the stroller. The child started to cry all of a sudden as if he’d caught fire, which in a sense he had. In response, Hikuma’s body jolted and he jumped to the side. The mother paused, coins still in hand, and turned towards her child. She hadn’t been watching when the cherry of Hikuma’s cigarette had pressed against the child’s cheek. Hikuma seemed to realize that his cigarette had touched something soft. Glancing alternately between his cigarette and the child’s screaming face, he fled the scene in a hurry. The mother crouched at the side of the child, whose face was bright red from crying, desperately trying to take the child’s hand off its cheek. When she did, she saw ashes on the child’s cheek. She looked all around her in confusion, still not comprehending what had happened to her child. In a dither, she could do nothing but look to the pedestrians around her with questioning eyes. Her face closely resembling the child’s, she looked as though she was about to start crying herself.