“And you can separate from yourself like that anytime you please?”
“No,” said Creta Kano, after thinking about it for a moment. “At first I could do it only when my body was experiencing physical pain. Pain was the key to the splitting off of my consciousness. Later, with Malta Kano’s help, I learned to do it at will to some extent. But that was much later.
“Before long, a letter arrived from Malta Kano. She told me that she had finally finished three years of a kind of training she had been doing on Malta and within the week would be returning to Japan. She planned to live in Japan permanently from then on. I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing her again. We had been apart for nearly eight years. And as I mentioned earlier, Malta was the only person in the world to whom I could freely tell everything that was in my heart.
“On the day she came back to Japan, I told Malta everything that had happened to me. She listened to my long, strange story to the very end without comment, without asking a single question. And when I was finished, she heaved a deep sigh and said to me, ‘I know I should have been with you, I should have been watching over you all this time. For some reason, I never realized that you had such profound problems. Perhaps it was because you were simply too close to me. But in any case, there were things I had to do. There were places I had to go, alone. I had no choice in the matter.’
“I told her that she should not let it bother her. These were my problems, after all, and I was improving little by little. She thought about this for a while, saying nothing, and then she said, ‘All the things you have been through ever since I left Japan have been painful and bitter for you, but as you say, you have been moving toward the proper state, step by step. The worst is over for you, and it will never come back. Such things will never happen to you again. It will not be easy, but you will be able to forget many things once a certain amount of time has passed. Without a true self, though, a person can not go on living. It is like the ground we stand on. Without the ground, we can build nothing.
“ ‘There is one thing, however, which you must never forget, and that is that your body has been defiled by that man. It is a thing that should never have happened. You could have been lost forever; you might have had to wander forever through genuine nothingness. Fortunately, the state of your being just happened not to be the real, original you, and so it had the reverse effect. Instead of trapping you, it liberated you from your transitory state. This happened through sheer good luck. The defilement, however, remains inside you, and at some point you will have to rid yourself of it. This is something that I cannot do for you. I cannot even tell you how to do it. You will have to discover the method for yourself, and do it by yourself.’
“My sister then gave me my new name: Creta Kano. Newly reborn, I needed a new name, she said. I liked it from the start. Malta Kano then began to use me as a spiritual medium. Under her guidance, I learned more and more how to control my new self and how to divide the flesh from the spirit. Finally, for the first time in my life, I became capable of living with a sense of peace. Of course, my true self was still something that lay beyond my grasp. I was still lacking too much for that to happen. But now, in Malta Kano, I had a companion by my side, someone I could depend upon, someone who understood me and accepted me. She became my guide and my protector.”
“But then you met Noboru Wataya again, didn’t you?”
Creta Kano nodded. “That is true,” she said. “I did meet Noboru Wataya again. It happened early in March of this year. More than five years had passed since I had been taken by him and undergone my transformation and begun to work with Malta Kano. We came face-to-face again when he visited our home to see Malta. We did not speak to each other. I merely caught a glimpse of him in the entryway, but one glimpse was all it took to freeze me in place as if I had been struck by lightning. It was that man—the last man to buy me.
“I called Malta Kano aside and told her that he was the man who had defiled me. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Just leave everything to me. Don’t worry. You keep out of sight. Make sure he doesn’t see you.’ I did as I was told. Which is why I do not know what he and Malta Kano discussed at that point.”
“What could Noboru Wataya have possibly wanted from Malta Kano?”
Creta Kano shook her head. “I am sorry, Mr. Okada, I have no idea.”
“People come to your house because they want something, isn’t that usually the case?”
“Yes, it is.”
“What kinds of things do they come for?”
“All kinds of things.”
“But what kinds of things? Can you give me an example?”
Creta Kano bit her lip for a moment. “Lost things. Their destinies. The future. Everything.”
“And you two know about those things?”
“We do. Not absolutely everything, but most of the answers are in here,” said Creta Kano, pointing at her temple. “You just have to go inside.”
“Like going down into a well?”
“Yes, like that.”
I put my elbows on the table and took a long, deep breath.
“Now, if you don’t mind, there’s something I’d like you to tell me. You showed up in my dreams a few times. You did this consciously. You willed it to happen. Am I right?”
“Yes, you are right,” said Creta Kano. “It was an act of will. I entered your consciousness and joined my body with yours.”
“You can do things like that?”
“Yes, I can. That is one of my functions.”
“You and I joined our bodies together in my mind.” When I heard myself actually speaking these words, I felt as if I had just hung a bold surrealistic painting on a white wall. And then, as if looking at the painting from a distance to make sure it was not hanging crooked, I said the words again: “You and I joined our bodies together in my mind. But I never asked you two for anything. It never even crossed my mind to find out anything from you. Right? So why did you take it upon yourself to do such a thing?”
“Because I was ordered to by Malta Kano.”
“Meaning that Malta Kano used you as a medium to hunt around inside my mind. What was she looking for? Answers for Noboru Wataya? Or for Kumiko?”
Creta Kano said nothing for a time. She seemed confused. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I was not given detailed information. That way, I can function more spontaneously as a medium. My only job is to have people’s minds pass through me. It is Malta Kano’s job to assign meaning to what I find there. But please understand, Mr. Okada: Malta Kano is fundamentally on your side. I hate Noboru Wataya, you see, and Malta Kano’s first concern is for me. She did this for your sake, Mr. Okada. That is what I believe.” Creta Kano went out to shop at the neighborhood supermarket. I gave her money and suggested that as long as she was going out, she should change into more respectable clothing. She nodded and went to Kumiko’s room, where she put on a white cotton blouse and a floral-pattern skirt.
•
“It doesn’t bother you, Mr. Okada, for me to put on your wife’s clothing?”
I shook my head. “Her letter told me to get rid of it all. No one’s going to be bothered if you wear her things.”
Just as I expected, everything fit her perfectly—almost weirdly so. Even her shoe size was the same. Creta Kano left the house wearing a pair of Kumiko’s sandals. The sight of Creta Kano in Kumiko’s clothing made me feel once again that reality was changing its direction somewhat, the way a huge passenger ship lumbers into a new course.
After Creta Kano went out, I lay on the sofa staring at the garden, my mind a blank. She came back by taxi thirty minutes later, holding three large bags stuffed with groceries. Then she made me ham and eggs and a sardine salad.
“Tell me, Mr. Okada, do you have any interest in Crete?” Creta Kano asked without warning after we had eaten.
“Crete?” I said. “You mean the island of Crete, in the Mediterranean?”
“Yes.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I
said. “I’m not uninterested, I suppose. I’ve never much thought about it.”
“Would you like to go to Crete with me?”
“Go to Crete with you?” I echoed.
“Well, actually, I would like to get away from Japan for a while. That is what I was thinking about the whole time I was in the well after you left. Ever since Malta gave me the name Creta, I have felt that I would like to go to Crete someday. To prepare, I read many books about the island. I even studied Greek by myself, so that I would be able to live there when the time came. I have some fairly substantial savings put away, enough so that we could live there for a good length of time without difficulty. You would not have to worry about money.”
“Does Malta Kano know you’re planning to go to Crete?”
“No. I haven’t said anything to her about it, but I am sure she would not be opposed. She would probably think it was a good thing for me. She has been using me as a medium during the past five years, but it is not as if she has merely been exploiting me as some kind of tool. She has been doing it to aid in my recovery as well. She believes that by passing the minds or egos of a variety of people through me, she will make it possible for me to obtain a firm grasp on my own self. Do you see what I mean? It works for me as a kind of vicarious experience of what it feels like to have an ego.
“Come to think of it, I have never once in my life said unambiguously to anybody, ‘I want to do this.’ In fact, I have never thought to myself, ‘I want to do this.’ From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain. And after I turned twenty and the pain disappeared when I attempted to kill myself, a deep, deep numbness came to replace the pain. I was like a walking corpse. A thick veil of unfeeling was draped over me. I had nothing—not a sliver—of what could be called my own will. And then, when I had my flesh violated and my mind pried open by Noboru Wataya, I obtained my third self. Even so, I was still not myself. All I had managed to do was get a grasp on the minimum necessary container for a self—a mere container. And as a container, under the guidance of Malta Kano, I passed many egos through myself.
“This, then, is how I have spent the twenty-six years of my life. Just imagine if you will: for twenty-six years, I was nothing. This is the thought that struck me with such force when I was alone in the well, thinking. During all this long time, the person called ‘me’ was in fact nothing at all, I realized. I was nothing but a prostitute. A prostitute of the flesh. A prostitute of the mind.
“Now, however, I am trying to get a grasp on my new self. I am neither a container nor a medium of passage. I am trying to establish myself here on the face of the earth.”
“I do understand what you are saying to me, but still, why do you want to go to Crete with me?”
“Because it would probably be a good thing for both of us: for you, Mr. Okada, and for me,” said Creta Kano. “For the time being, there is no need for either of us to be here. And if that is the case, I feel, it would be better for us not to be here. Tell me, Mr. Okada, do you have some course of action you must follow—some plan for what you are going to do from this point on?”
“The one thing I need to do is talk to Kumiko. Until we meet face-to-face and she tells me that our life together is finished, I can’t do anything else. How I’m going to go about finding her, though, I have no idea.”
“But if you do find her and your marriage is, as you say, ‘finished,’ would you consider coming to Crete with me? Both of us would have to start something new at some point,” said Creta Kano, looking into my eyes. “It seems to me that going to the island of Crete would not be a bad beginning.”
“Not bad at all,” I said. “Kind of sudden, maybe, but not a bad beginning.”
Creta Kano smiled at me. When I thought about it, I realized this was the first time she had ever done so. It made me feel that, to some extent, history was beginning to head in the right direction. “We still have time,” she said. “Even if I hurry, it will take me at least two weeks to get ready. Please use the time to think it over, Mr. Okada. I don’t know if there is anything I can give you. It seems to me that I don’t have anything to give at this point in time. I am quite literally empty. I am just getting started, putting some contents into this empty container little by little. I can give you myself, Mr. Okada, if you say that is good enough for you. I believe we can help each other.”
I nodded. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’m very pleased that you made me this offer, and I think it would be great if we could go together. I really do. But I’ve got a lot of things I have to think about and a lot of things I have to straighten out.”
“And if, in the end, you say you don’t want to go to Crete, don’t worry. I won’t be hurt. I will be sorry, but I want your honest answer.”
•
Creta Kano stayed in my house again that night. As the sun was going down, she invited me out for a stroll in the neighborhood park. I decided to forget about my bruise and leave the house. What was the point of worrying about such things? We walked for an hour in the pleasant summer evening, then came home and ate.
After our supper, Creta Kano said she wanted to sleep with me. She wanted to have physical sex with me, she said. This was so sudden, I didn’t know what to do, which is exactly what I said to her: “This is so sudden. I don’t know what to do.”
Looking directly at me, Creta Kano said, “Whether or not you go with me to Crete, Mr. Okada, entirely separately from that, I want you to take me one time—just one time—as a prostitute. I want you to buy my flesh. Here. Tonight. It will be my last time. I will cease to be a prostitute, whether of the flesh or of the mind. I will abandon the name of Creta Kano as well. In order to do that, however, I want to have a clearly visible point of demarcation, something that says, ‘It ends here.’ ”
“I understand your wanting a point of demarcation, but why do you have to sleep with me?”
“Don’t you see, Mr. Okada? By sleeping with the real you, by joining my body with yours in reality, I want to pass through you, this person called Mr. Okada. By doing that, I want to be liberated from this defilementlike something inside me. That will be the point of demarcation.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t buy people’s flesh.”
Creta Kano bit her lip. “How about this, then? Instead of money, give me some of your wife’s clothing. And shoes. We’ll make that the pro forma price of my flesh. That should be all right, don’t you think? Then I will be saved.”
“Saved. By which you mean that you will be liberated from the defilement that Noboru Wataya left inside you?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I mean,” said Creta Kano.
I stared at her. Without false eyelashes, Creta Kano’s face had a much more childish look. “Tell me,” I said, “who is this Noboru Wataya guy, really? He’s my wife’s brother, but I hardly know him. What is he thinking? What does he want? All I know for sure is that he and I hate each other.”
“Noboru Wataya is a person who belongs to a world that is the exact opposite of yours,” said Creta Kano. Then she seemed to be searching for the words she needed to continue. “In a world where you are losing everything, Mr. Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so intensely.”
“I don’t get it. Why would he even notice that I’m alive? He’s famous, he’s powerful. Compared to him, I’m an absolute zero. Why does he have to take the time and trouble to bother hating me?”
Creta Kano shook her head. “Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr. Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your hea
rt, hatred is the most difficult thing in the world to shake off.”
“And you were able to feel it, weren’t you?—the root of the hatred that was in Noboru Wataya’s heart.”
“Yes, I was. I am,” said Creta Kano. “That is the thing that split my flesh in two, that defiled me, Mr. Okada. Which is why I do not want him to be my last customer as a prostitute. Do you understand?”
That night I went to bed with Creta Kano. I took off what she was wearing of Kumiko’s and joined my body with hers. Quietly and gently. It felt like an extension of my dream, as if I were re-creating exactly, in reality, the very acts I had performed with Creta Kano in my dream. Her body was real and alive. But there was something missing: the clear sense that this was actually happening. Several times the illusion overtook me that I was doing this with Kumiko, not Creta Kano. I was sure I would wake up the moment I came. But I did not wake up. I came inside her. It was reality. True reality. But each time I recognized that fact, reality felt a little less real. Reality was coming undone and moving away from reality, one small step at a time. But still, it was reality.
“Mr. Okada,” said Creta Kano, with her arms wrapped around my back, “let’s go to Crete together. This is not the place for us anymore: not for you and not for me. We have to go to Crete. If you stay here, something bad is going to happen to you. I know it. I am sure of it.”
“Something bad?”
“Something very, very bad,” Creta Kano prophesied—in a small but penetrating voice, like the prophet bird that lived in the forest.
The Only Bad Thing That Ever Happened
in May Kasahara’s House
•
May Kasahara on the Gooshy Source of Heat
“Hello, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said the woman’s voice. Pressing the receiver against my ear, I looked at my watch. Four o’clock in the afternoon. When the phone rang, I had been asleep on the sofa, drenched in sweat. It had been a short, unpleasant nap. And now there remained with me the physical sensation of someone’s having been sitting on top of me the whole time I was asleep. Whoever it was had waited until I was asleep, come to sit on top of me, and gotten up and gone away just before I woke.