But my father was wrong. I was already a cancer. The only reason I was carrying a radio-controlled car was to deceive him. I was always thinking of ways of exterminating him, and I had been fantasizing about those plans for a long time, every day it seemed.
AT THAT TIME I did not know how many rooms there were in the mansion.
The hill behind the house was like a forest, and in the garden were two ponds surrounded by stones. The hill was untended and wild, but the ponds were stocked with carp. Usually carp live to a ripe old age, but for some unknown reason on our estate they never lasted long.
Apart from the young servant girls, there was also a quiet, middle-aged woman called Tanabe who was in charge of all the domestic staff. At first I thought she was my mother, but that wasn’t the case. I had no idea where my mother was. No one had even told me if she was alive or dead.
The girl in the white dress was named Kaori. Not even she knew her original last name. She was adopted into the family from a children’s home and given the same surname as me, Kuki. Our gloomy house was on the outskirts of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture. The building is still standing, but no Kukis live there anymore.
Kaori and I went to the local public elementary school. Normally I would have expected to attend a private school like my older siblings, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He thought that a public school was better for coming in contact with people from all levels of society. To make me a cancer I had to learn to mix with a wide range of people. That was probably what he had in mind.
Most of my schooling was done by three home tutors. I’ve largely forgotten what they were like. There is only one, a young man, I remember well. Although he was only there for a short time, he became a bright spot in my joyless daily routine.
He was very muscular, and behind his back the servants and I called him the Muscleman. When he heard this nickname he took a fancy to it and started using it himself. Physically, however, he was so weak that it made me wonder what those big muscles were for, and he moved ponderously. He also had a tendency to say tactless things—for example, he once told a servant whose eyes were too far apart that she was lucky to have 180-degree vision. Usually I laughed at his jokes just because that’s what children were supposed to do, but sometimes my laughter was genuine. For some reason, at those times I would feel sorry for myself.
My school life was uneventful. All I had to do was make some effort to hide my depression from those around me. I couldn’t afford to let them discover that I was the kind of boy who regularly threw lizards and other small creatures off the cliff on the hill out the back. Nor that I used to pick up hair and fingernail clippings that had been dropped around the house and store them in a box, on the theory that at least some of them must be my mother’s. Even without those eccentricities, a boy who lived in an obscenely big house and was good at nothing but studying was unlikely to fit in at school. I decided to trick them by concealing myself in a cloak of laughter. I think the other kids were more at ease with me that way. He might be a Kuki brat, they’d think, but he likes a joke as much as the rest of us, and he’s more frivolous than serious.
For instance, our homeroom teacher was so fat that he always seemed in danger of bursting. He also had the habit of saying, “To give a concrete example,” and then following up with an explanation that wasn’t concrete at all. I christened him “Concrete Bomb.” During lessons I would count how many times he said, “To give a concrete example,” and tell my classmates. The big blob’s lectures were full of statements like, “To give a concrete example, the numerator and denominator are like curry and a sweet bun.” We had gotten it into our heads that if he used the phrase more than forty times his stomach would explode, so we were always keyed up in his classes. I felt terrible about deceiving people around me to hide my darkness, but later I learned that many people actually live like that when they are young.
Kaori was in the same class as me. Since she was tall with large eyes, she attracted a lot of attention. Concrete Bomb told the class, falsely but thoughtfully, that she was a distant relative of mine. On her first day there we did the high jump. When she leapt higher than all the other girls, a small cheer went up. But I was less interested in the height of the jump than in her white legs sticking out of her gym shorts on top of the blue mats. I was still young and felt a deep shame at my lustful urges. If my father said we had to become intimate, that was a sure sign that we shouldn’t. I looked away, but a child’s will is weak, and before I knew it I was staring at her again.
Kaori and I went home from school together. Since Father had dismissed the estate’s driver, it had become my habit to walk home.
“It must be great being rich,” Kaori said on that first day.
“No, it’s not.”
“It must be. And I hear you’re good at studying too? I’m hopeless.”
She laughed innocently, showing her teeth. With her long limbs, I couldn’t imagine a girl who would look odder wearing a child’s school bag than her.
“Even if I am rich, it’s not like I earned it. And the only reason I am able to study is because I’ve got a tutor. There’s nothing impressive about it. Not at all.” In those days I had the habit of forgetting to pretend and rebelling against even the smallest things.
She looked pensive. I had to keep talking so she wouldn’t think I was being perverse.
“So I’ve got to grow up. If I can do something for myself, that will be impressive.” I didn’t really believe this.
She gave me a puzzled look, and we walked in silence for a while. Then she laughed.
“But weren’t you the one who gave Concrete Bomb his name?”
MY FATHER HAD five other children—my older brothers and sisters—but at that stage I’d never met any of them. Most of them lived in Tokyo and never came near the mansion—they hadn’t even come to see me when I was born. My father’s name was Shozo, but none of my siblings, not even the eldest son, had inherited any of the Chinese characters in his name. Twenty-five years separated me from my oldest brother; from the next, twenty-three; from my oldest sister, eighteen; my third brother, fifteen; my second sister, twelve. I also knew that the Tokyo University grad student my father had talked about, the one who was in the cult, had a son the same age as me. I wondered if he had become a cancer, and vaguely expected that I’d meet him sometime, along with my brothers and sisters.
When we reached the gloomy house, the Muscleman was standing outside the gate. He grumbled that I was late, but then he noticed Kaori. Immediately he held out his hand and introduced himself, using his nickname. She hesitated before shaking his hand, perhaps intimidated by his physique, perhaps put off by the fact that he was sweating even though it wasn’t hot.
“You said I was late, but I’ve still got five minutes, haven’t I?”
“Well, I don’t care,” he mumbled. “But my muscles do.”
He wiggled his pecs. Laughing in surprise, Kaori cried out, admiring his pointless muscles. Then, with his usual lack of tact, he looked at her and said, “Maybe you and Fumihiro will get married.” I was struck dumb, but Kaori turned to look at the dark buildings.
“If I do, I’ll live like a princess, won’t I?” she said and laughed carelessly.
From a distance it would have looked like a happy scene. And who knows, maybe at that time we were still happy.
THAT NIGHT, OR perhaps the next, my father summoned me. It was the first time he had called me since the day he told me of his plans for my education. Until then, he had never shown the slightest interest in me. When I heard that he wanted to talk to me again, I was certain it would be more on the same subject. And even if it wasn’t, just meeting him was enough to make me nervous. Stifling my panic, I took a bunch of stickers from my desk drawer and clutched them in my hand.
The room to which I was called was large, with a long table, a television and a carpet of a dull purple-red. Here Father always dined alone, and he had decreed that Kaori and I would eat with the servants in another room.
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There was no answer to my knock, so I opened the door quietly. Father was sitting in one of the six dining chairs, smoking and watching TV. His face was blank, and I couldn’t tell what sort of mood he was in. This time too he smelled of alcohol. It occurred to me that he never used to drink that much. The room was dark, but I could still make out his face. With a big nose and abnormally narrow eyes, he was quite ugly. Half of his left ear was missing, I didn’t know why.
“My second son is involved in this war,” he said, still gazing at the screen and not looking in my direction.
The news was showing a report on a civil war in a small African country I knew nothing about. The anchor was reading out the number of deaths.
“You should remember this. They’re calling it an ethnic conflict, but that’s a lie. Someone is stirring up trouble between them. My son’s got the rights for postwar reconstruction. I don’t remember raising him as a cancer, but somehow he keeps acting like one. I need to do something about that.”
He turned to me and gestured slightly with his fingers. I didn’t understand what he meant, but he pointed at my stickers.
“Put those in the ashtray. Don’t bring things like that in here.”
My legs went weak and my heart was racing. As instructed, I put the bundle of stickers in the clear ashtray, and Father placed his half-smoked cigarette on top of them. He didn’t stub it out, just rested it there, still smoldering.
The surface of the stickers scorched and then caught fire. Small, red flames flickered in the noise of the war report on TV. Looking at the orange glow, I couldn’t prevent my brain from going foggy. I was unable to gauge my father’s thoughts, whether he was burning the stickers because I valued them or because the cheap, sparkly things offended him. The flames grew larger, and a curl of smoke rose from them. When the stickers started to give off an unpleasant odor, Father doused the fire with the liquor from the glass he was holding. His expression didn’t change. I realized that he wouldn’t even register the smell, the price of his own spite. My stickers turned to wet, black ash among the cigarette butts. I thought of the hell that Father had promised to show me someday.
The stickers weren’t important to me, though. I was only carrying them to make myself look childish, and the flames caused me no pain at all. I looked away from him, my mind in a whirl. My father was wrong. I was beyond his control. But straight after that I thought of Kaori.
“That’s enough,” he said softly. “Go. What are you so upset about? You’re even forgetting to act childishly. You still haven’t perfected your role. Fool. There is nothing so foolish as a child.”
I left the room and headed for the hill out the back.
Carrying a flashlight, I went out the back door, crossed the garden and crawled through the hole in the fence. The trees rustled in the breeze as though moving of their own volition. Insects brushed against my cheeks and when I heard a dog barking I halted. There was faint moonlight, but the night was dark and cold. Until then I’d always climbed the hill in the late afternoon, while it was still light, but I had to conquer my fear.
My earliest memory was of Father. The servant girls were chasing me and laughing. I was laughing too as I waddled away from them, always on the verge of toppling over. I felt like I was floating in mid-air, perhaps because I’d just started walking and didn’t have full control of my legs, and because my line of sight was suddenly higher. On the dirt wall I could see a large green circle, an after-image of some kind. I tried to move forward once more but ran into something that felt like a pillar. I raised my eyes, and there was Father. Somehow I knew who he was. Stony-faced, he swept me aside with his foot, as if it was a nuisance even to kick me.
My flashlight illuminated the dirt path through the weeds. I was relieved. If I’d come this far, the hole was nearby. I shouldn’t have been afraid, though, because it was my mountain. I remembered the first time I’d found my father’s underground room. The house had an enormous cellar and over the years a huge hoard of furniture and other old junk had been stored there. When I was in fourth grade I got lost in there, and since then I’d explored it in secret. In the basement I’d discovered an entrance to an even deeper level. After moving aside some worn tires and lifting an ancient cloth that looked out of place, I found a square hatch in the floor. When I opened it I could see a narrow set of stairs with a door at the bottom.
My instincts immediately told me that this was bad. This was a place I should not enter, I felt. If I went in there my life would change forever. The door handle was almost entirely free of dust. I held my breath and pushed down the lever. There was no lock.
Inside, I was hit by an overpowering darkness. I’d never seen such an impenetrable black. Its density, actually heavy enough to feel, continued to bombard me, the intruder, even after my eyes had grown accustomed to it. It reminded me of my father. He was purely the embodiment of terror, and whenever he spoke my hands, my feet, my heart, even my temples went numb. I was a thing to be brushed aside with his foot, and as such I could be crushed by a change in his mood as easily as I could crush an insect in my hand. Out of the corner of my eye I could faintly make out a white switch in the darkness. When I turned it on, blades of light struck my eyes. Beyond the glare, in the center of the room, stood a bed.
My mother was sleeping. That was the first thought that popped into my head. No one was there, though, and the empty bed was the only furniture in that confined space. It had a white quilt and pillow, and sheets covered the mattress. Even though, like the door handle, the room was almost free of dust, it felt deserted. On top of the bed were four long ropes. Clumps of old hair were strewn on the pillow and duvet, an extraordinary amount.
I didn’t know what it all meant, but I sensed that this place was the center of something. A side of my father that I wasn’t supposed to see. I didn’t have the courage to touch the ropes or the hair. From that day on, that bed in that black room haunted my dreams. Sometimes I heard a woman’s voice coming from underground, but that was impossible. The room had been soundproofed for some reason, and no matter how much noise was made inside, it would never be heard.
Perhaps the reason I started making regular trips to the mountain was to fight back against that darkness in some way. To protect myself by building up my own darkness. At that age, however, I hadn’t formed such a theory. Still, I think I went there with that vague idea in my head.
On that day, when I was climbing the hill with a flashlight in my hand after my stickers were burned, I still couldn’t have put those thoughts into words. I just forced my feet to move, telling myself that I mustn’t be afraid of the darkness. In front of me I could see a hole in the cliff, covered in wire netting. I didn’t know what it was for. Feeling the menace of the darkness and the surrounding trees, I tried to convince myself that I was calm.
I walked along the fence, moved aside a sheet of plywood in the thick foliage, and picked up a small, concealed cage. Inside were lizards and snails that I had captured before. I grabbed a lizard, reached through the fence and abruptly opened my hand. Without a sound, it was swallowed up by the darkness. I didn’t hear the noise when it hit the ground, but I imagined it. I took a snail, reached through the netting again and dropped it too. Through their sacrifice, I believed, my own darkness would become deeper. Deeper than my father’s. Bigger and stronger than that terrifying, incomprehensible figure.
THE SERVANTS DRESSED Kaori in an assortment of clothes. A yellow, patterned cardigan, blue denim shorts, a plain white skirt, a cream coat. A pink hooded sweatshirt with pale blue pinstripes, a thick white sweater. Kaori always said that she didn’t want expensive clothes. She preferred to wear the same as her classmates. She was using a dirty old bag and umbrella until the servants noticed.
We entered sixth grade.
I watched her in her various outfits, looking away whenever she seemed about to catch me at it. After my tutor left she always came to my room, never noticing my discomfort. She would sprawl unguardedly on the bed, her le
gs sticking out from her skirt. Let’s play cards, she’d say, laying them out on the covers. Looking at her while trying my best not to, I found it hard to breathe.
Once she found my porn magazine. When I came back from the bathroom she was in my room, and the large drawer of my desk was open. The magazine was chock-full of pictures of naked women, and I’d gone to a lot of trouble to get a hold of it. Kaori was studying it earnestly, and she cried out when she saw me. Usually I put it inside a city directory at the bottom of the drawer, under an atlas, a name list for the kids in my class and a pile of thin files, but on that particular day I hadn’t hidden it properly.
I was confused and ashamed, but Kaori laughed and called me a dirty old man. Suddenly I thought of a boy named Iijima who sat next to me at school. I put all the blame on this poor kid, making up a story that I’d borrowed it from him, that he was the real pervert. Kaori pointed at the breasts of one of the women in the photos, exclaiming how big they were. Then she cupped her hands in front of her own chest.
“So, you’re interested in things like these?”
“No.”
“Do they turn you on?”
“No.”
She looked at me, grinning.
“You never lift up the girls’ skirts like Yazaki and the others, so I thought you were a nice boy.”
It was true I didn’t do that, but I always had a good look when Yazaki and his friends did.
“So, do you want to lift mine, then?”
She laughed again, raising the hem of her own skirt.
IT WAS ABOUT three months later that she found my box of hair and fingernail clippings, when she was looking for my porno mag again. Kaori had gone into my room without telling me, and when I came back she was staring at the open box with a puzzled frown.
It was filled to the brim. The tangled old hair was bone-dry and the nails were shriveled and curled. Their color had changed to a dark red as they dried, as if to show that they once were human. Even from where I was standing in the doorway it was obvious that it wasn’t all old stuff, that some of it had been harvested recently.