Beyond the door was a small kitchen and washbasin, and beyond that was yet another room, one much like the reception room in which I had been sitting, but a size smaller. It had the same kind of well-aged leather sofa and a window of the same shape. The carpet on the floor was the same color as the other one as well. In the middle of the room was a large workbench, with scissors, toolboxes, pencils, and design books laid out in an orderly fashion. There were two tailors’ dummies. The window had not merely a blind but two sets of curtains, cloth and lace, both shut tight. With the ceiling light off, the room was gloomy, as on the evening of a cloudy day. One bulb of the floor lamp near the sofa had been turned off. A glass vase holding gladiolus blossoms stood on the coffee table in front of the sofa. The flowers were fresh, as if cut only moments before, the water in the vase clear. The music was not audible in this room, nor were there any pictures or clocks on the walls.
The young man gestured silently again, this time for me to sit on the sofa. Once I had seated myself (on a similarly comfortable couch) in accordance with his instructions, he took something like a pair of swim goggles from his pants pocket and stretched them out before my eyes. They were swim goggles, just ordinary goggles made of rubber and plastic, much the same as the ones I used when swimming in the ward pool. Why he had brought them out here I had no idea. I couldn’t even imagine.
the young man said to me. Properly speaking, he “said” nothing. He simply moved his lips that way and moved his fingers ever so slightly. Still, I had an accurate understanding of what he was saying to me. I nodded.
I nodded again.
I nodded.
The young man walked behind the sofa and put the goggles over my eyes. He stretched the rubber strap around to the back of my head and adjusted the eye cups so that the foam pads properly surrounded my eyes. The one way these goggles were different from the ones I always used was that I couldn’t see anything through them. A thick layer of something had been painted over the transparent plastic. A complete—and artificial—darkness surrounded me. I couldn’t see a thing. I had no idea where the light of the floor lamp was shining. I had the illusion that I myself had been painted over with a thick layer of something.
The young man rested his hands lightly on my shoulders as if to encourage me. He had slim, delicate fingers, but they were in no way fragile. They had the strangely assertive presence of the fingers of a pianist resting on the keyboard, and coming through them I could sense a kind of goodwill—or, if not precisely goodwill, something very close to it. they conveyed to me. I nodded. Then he left the room. In the darkness, I could hear his footsteps drawing into the distance, and then the sound of a door opening and closing.
•
I went on sitting in the same position for some time after the young man left the room. The darkness in which I sat had something strange about it. In my being unable to see anything, it was the same as the darkness I had experienced in the well, but otherwise it had a certain quality that made it entirely different. It had no direction or depth, no weight or tangibility. It was less like darkness and more like nothingness. I had merely been rendered temporarily blind by artificial means. I felt my muscles stiffening, my mouth and throat going dry. What was going to happen to me? But then I recalled the touch of the young man’s fingers. Don’t worry, they had told me. For no clear reason, I felt that those “words” of his were something I could believe in.
The room was so utterly still that when I held my breath I was overtaken by a sense that the world had stopped in its tracks and everything would eventually be swallowed up by water, sinking to eternal depths. But no, the world was apparently still moving. Before long, a woman opened the door and stepped quietly into the room.
I knew it was a woman from the delicate fragrance of her perfume. This was not a scent a man would wear. It was probably expensive perfume. I tried to recall the scent, but I could not do so with confidence. Suddenly robbed of my sight, I found my sense of smell had also been thrown off balance. The one thing I could be sure of was that the perfume I was smelling now was different from that of the well-dressed woman who had directed me to this place. I could hear the slight sound of the woman’s clothes rustling as she crossed the room and gently lowered herself onto the sofa, to my right. So lightly did she settle into the cushions of the sofa that it was clear she was a small woman.
Sitting there, the woman stared straight at me. I could feel her eyes focused on my face. You really can feel someone looking at you, even if you can’t see, I realized. The woman, never moving, went on staring at me for a long time. I sensed her slow, gentle breathing but could not hear a sound. I remained in the same position, facing straight ahead. The mark on my cheek felt slightly feverish to me. The color was probably more vivid than usual. Eventually, the woman reached out and placed her fingertips on my mark, very carefully, as if inspecting some valuable, fragile thing. Then she began to caress it.
I didn’t know how to react to this, or how I was expected to react. I had only the most distant sense of reality. I felt strangely detached, as if trying to leap from one moving vehicle to another that was moving at a different speed. I existed in the empty space between the two, a vacant house. I was now a vacant house, just as the Miyawaki house had once been. This woman had come into the vacant house and, for some unknown reason, was running her hands all over the walls and pillars. Whatever her reason might be, vacant house that I was (and I was that and nothing more), I could do nothing (I needed to do nothing) about it. Once that thought crossed my mind, I was able to relax somewhat.
The woman said nothing. Aside from the sound of rustling clothes, the room was enveloped in a deep silence. The woman traced her fingertips over my skin as if trying to read some minute secret script that had been engraved there ages ago.
Finally, she stopped caressing my mark. She then stood up, came around behind me, and, instead of her fingertips, used her tongue. Just as May Kasahara had done in the garden last summer, she licked my mark. The way she did it, however, was far more mature than the way May Kasahara had done it. Her tongue moved and clung to my flesh with far greater skill. With varying pressure, changing angles, and different movements, it tasted and sucked and stimulated my mark. I felt a hot, moist throbbing below the waist. I didn’t want to have an erection. To do so would have been all too meaningless. But I couldn’t stop myself.
I struggled to superimpose my own image upon that of a vacant house. I thought of myself as a pillar, a wall, a ceiling, a floor, a roof, a window, a door, a stone. It seemed the most reasonable thing to do.
I close my eyes and separate from this flesh of mine, with its filthy tennis shoes, its weird goggles, its clumsy erection. Separating from the flesh is not so difficult. It can put me far more at ease, allow me to cast off the discomfort I feel. I am a weed-choked garden, a flightless stone bird, a dry well. I know that a woman is inside this vacant house that is myself. I cannot see her, but it doesn’t bother me anymore. If she is looking for something inside here, I might as well give it to her.
•
The passage of time becomes increasingly unclear. Of all the kinds of time available to me here, I lose track of which kind I am using. My consciousness goes gradually back into my flesh, and in turn the woman seems to be leaving. She leaves the room as quietly as she came in. The rustle of clothing. The shimmering smell of perfume. The sound of a door opening, then closing. Part of my consciousness is still there as an empty house. At the same time, I am still here, on this sofa, as me. I think, What should I do now? I can’t decide which one is reality. Little by little, the word “here” seems to split in two inside me. I am here, but I am also here. Both seem equally real to me. Sitting on the sofa, I steep myself in this strange separati
on.
•
Soon the door opened and someone came into the room. I could tell from the footsteps that it was the young man. He came around behind me and took off the goggles. The room was dark, the only light the single bulb of the floor lamp. I rubbed my eyes with my palms, making them accustomed to the world of reality. The young man was now wearing a suit coat. Its deep gray, with hints of green, was a perfect match for the color of his tie. With a soft smile, he took my arm, helped me to stand, and guided me to the back door of the room. He opened the door to reveal a bathroom on the other side. It had a toilet and, beyond the toilet, a small shower stall. The toilet lid was down, and he had me sit on top of it while he turned the shower on. He waited for the hot water to begin flowing, then he gestured for me to take a shower. He unwrapped a fresh bar of soap and handed the cake to me. Then he went out of the bathroom and closed the door. Why did I have to take a shower here? I didn’t get it.
I finally got it as I was undressing. I had come in my underpants. I stepped into the hot shower and washed myself with the new green soap. I rinsed away the semen sticking to my pubic hair. I stepped out of the shower and dried myself with a large towel. Beside the towel I found a pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts and a T-shirt, both still in their vinyl wrappers and both my size. Maybe they had planned for me to come in my pants. I stared at myself in the mirror for a while, but my head was not working right. I threw my soiled underwear into a wastebasket and put on the clean, white new underpants, the clean, white new T-shirt. Then I put on my jeans and slipped my sweatshirt over my head. I put on my socks and my dirty tennis shoes and finally my baseball jacket. Then I stepped out of the bathroom.
•
The young man was waiting for me outside and guided me to the original waiting room.
The room looked as it had earlier. On the desk lay the same opened book, next to which stood the computer. Anonymous classical music flowed from the speakers. The young man had me sit on the sofa and brought me a glass of chilled mineral water. I drank half the glass. “I seem to be tired,” I said. The voice didn’t sound like mine. Nor had I been intending to say any such thing. The words had come out of nowhere, without reference to my will. The voice was definitely mine, though.
The young man nodded. He took a white envelope from the inner pocket of his suit coat and slipped it into the inner pocket of my baseball jacket. Then he nodded once again. I looked outside. The sky was dark, and the street was aglow with neon signs, the light from office building windows, streetlamps, and headlights. The thought of staying in this room any longer became increasingly intolerable. Without a word, I stood up, crossed the room, opened the door, and went out. The young man watched me from the place where he stood by his desk, but he remained as silent as ever and made no attempt to stop me from leaving.
•
The return commute had Akasaka Mitsuke Station churning. In no mood for the bad air of the subway, I decided to go as far as I could on foot. I walked past the palace for foreign dignitaries as far as Yotsuya Station. Then I walked along Shinjuku Boulevard and went into a small place without too many people, to have a glass of draft beer. My first swallow made me notice how hungry I was, so I ordered a snack. I looked at my watch and realized it was almost seven o’clock. Come to think of it, though, the time of day was of no concern to me.
At one point, I noticed there was something in the inner pocket of my jacket. I had forgotten all about the envelope the young man had given me on my way out. It was just an ordinary white envelope, but holding it, I realized it was much heavier than it looked. More than just heavy, though, its weight had something strange about it, as though there were something inside holding its breath. After an indecisive moment, I tore it open—which was something I would have to do sooner or later. Inside was a neat bundle of ten-thousand-yen notes. Brand-new ten-thousand-yen notes, without a crease or wrinkle. They didn’t look real, they were so new, though I could find no reason for them not to be new. There were twenty bills in all. I counted them again to be sure. Yes, no doubt about it: twenty bills. Two hundred thousand yen.
I returned the money to the envelope and the envelope to my pocket. Then I picked up the fork from the table and stared at it for no reason. The first thing that popped into my head was that I would use the money to buy myself a new pair of shoes. That was the one thing I needed most. I paid my bill and went back out to Shinjuku Boulevard, where there was a large shoe store. I chose some very ordinary blue sneakers and told the salesman my size without checking the price. I would wear them home if they fit, I said. The salesman (who might have been the owner) threaded white laces through the eyelets of both sneakers and asked, “What shall I do with your old shoes?” I said he could throw them away, but then I reconsidered and said I would take them home.
He flashed me a nice smile. “An old pair of good shoes can come in handy, even if they’re a little messy,” he said, as if to imply that he was used to seeing such dirty shoes all the time. Then he put the old ones in the box the new ones had come in and put the box in a shopping bag. Lying in their new box, the old tennis shoes looked like tiny animal corpses. I paid the bill with one of the crisp new ten-thousand-yen notes from the envelope, and for change received a few not-so-new thousand-yen notes. Taking the bag with the old shoes along, I got on the Odakyu train and went home. I hung on to the strap, mingling with homebound commuters, and thought about the new items I was wearing—my new underpants and T-shirt and shoes.
•
Home again, I sat at the kitchen table as usual, drinking a beer and listening to music on the radio. It then occurred to me that I wanted to talk to someone—about the weather, about political stupidity; it didn’t matter what. I just wanted to talk to somebody, but I couldn’t think of anyone, not one person I could talk to. I didn’t even have the cat.
•
Shaving the next morning, I inspected the mark on my face, as usual. I couldn’t see any change in it. I sat on the veranda and, for the first time in a long time, spent the day just looking at the garden out back. It was a nice morning, a nice afternoon. The leaves of the trees fluttered in the early-spring breeze.
I took the envelope containing the nineteen ten-thousand-yen notes out of my jacket pocket and put it in my desk drawer. It still felt strangely heavy in my hand. Some kind of meaning seemed to permeate the heaviness, but I could not understand what it was. It reminded me of something, I suddenly realized. What I had done reminded me of something. Staring hard at the envelope in the drawer, I tried to remember what it was, but I couldn’t do it.
I closed the drawer, went to the kitchen, made myself some tea, and was standing by the sink, drinking the tea, when I remembered what it was. What I had done yesterday was amazingly similar to the work Creta Kano had done as a call girl. You go to a designated place, sleep with someone you don’t know, and get paid. I had not actually slept with the woman (just come in my pants), but aside from that, it was the same thing. In need of a certain amount of money, I had offered my flesh to someone to get it. I thought about this as I drank my tea. A dog barked in the distance. Shortly afterward, I heard a small propeller plane. But my thoughts would not come together. I went out to the veranda again and looked at the garden, wrapped in afternoon sunlight. When I tired of doing that, I looked at the palms of my hands. To think that I should have become a prostitute! Who could have imagined that I would have sold my body for money? Or that I would have first bought new sneakers with the money?
I wanted to breathe the outside air, so I decided to go shopping nearby. I walked down the street, wearing my new sneakers. I felt as if these new shoes had transformed me into a new being, entirely different from what I had been before. The street scene and the faces of the people I passed looked somewhat different too. In the neighborhood supermarket, I picked up vegetables and eggs and milk and fish and coffee beans, paying for them with the bills I had received as change at the shoe store the night before. I wanted to tell the round-faced, middle-aged woman
at the register that I had made this money the previous day by selling my body. I had earned two hundred thousand yen. Two hundred thousand yen! I could slave away at the law office where I used to work, doing overtime every day for a month, and I might come home with a little over one hundred fifty thousand yen. That’s what I wanted to say to her. But of course I said nothing. I handed over the money and received a paper bag filled with groceries in return.
One thing was sure: things had started to move. I told myself this as I walked home clutching my bag of groceries. Now all I had to do was hold on tight to keep from being knocked off. If I could do that, I would probably end up somewhere—somewhere different from where I was now, at least.
•
My premonition was not mistaken. When I got home, the cat came out to greet me. Just as I opened the front door, he let out a loud meow as if he had been waiting all day and came up to me, bent-tip tail held high. It was Noboru Wataya, missing now for almost a year. I set the bag of groceries down and scooped him up in my arms.
A Place You Can Figure Out
If You Think About It Really, Really Hard
(May Kasahara’s Point of View: 1)
•
Hi, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.
I’ll bet you think I’m in a classroom somewhere, studying with a textbook open in front of me, like any ordinary high school kid. Sure, last time we met I told you myself that I was going to go to “another school,” so it would be natural for you to think so. And in fact, I did go to another school, a private boarding school for girls, far, far away, a fancy one, with big, clean rooms like hotel rooms, and a cafeteria where you could choose whatever you wanted to eat, and big, shiny new tennis courts and a swimming pool, so naturally it was pretty expensive, a place for rich girls. Problem rich girls. You can imagine what it was like—an honest-to-goodness refined-country-school kind of thing in the mountains. It was surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire, and it had this huge iron gate that Godzilla himself couldn’t have kicked in and round-the-clock guards clunking around like robots—not so much to keep people on the outside from getting in as to keep people on the inside from getting out.