I sat there and wept. Perhaps from time to time I cried out. When I was finally able to stand, it was already quite dark.
THE RAIN THAT had started abruptly several days before had stopped, giving us a brief respite. A distant sun cast rays through gaps in the low, heavy clouds. Since morning, rain that couldn’t make up its mind to become snow had formed countless puddles on the pavement, throwing random reflections of the strengthening sunshine. I’d stepped in several of these by accident and my leather shoes were soaked. The woman who doubled as receptionist met me as before, smiling and without make-up. When she ushered me into the reception room the doctor stood, looking at my face.
I sat on the white sofa and he pushed an ashtray towards me. As always, it didn’t feel like a hospital. The surgeon was dressed in ordinary clothes, and his rigid smile was hardly a smile at all. The potted plants had grown a bit since last time, and the room seemed to be buried in soft foliage.
“I’ve decided to leave Japan for a while,” I said.
He nodded slightly.
“I want to take some time to think things over. Everything that’s happened. There’s been too much going on.”
The warm air gently stroked my cold skin. Without getting up, I took off my coat.
“But do you really have to leave to do that? And will you ever come back?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. I just want to get away from it all for a while … think things over.”
He nodded again, but I couldn’t tell if he approved or not.
“I see,” he said. “Well, I’ll give you several months’ worth of pills. They’re just a precaution, but it’s best if you keep taking them.”
“Thanks.”
The woman entered with tea. Steam rose from the white cups, hanging in the air for ages. She walked out again silently, her smile still firmly in place.
“I worked on her face too,” he said, lifting the cup to his mouth.
The tea must still have been piping hot, but he drank it calmly without blowing on it first. It was as strong as ever.
“You two are mysterious,” I said.
“You’re pretty mysterious yourself.”
I looked around the room, filled with green like a conservatory.
“What’s your …?”
He didn’t seem surprised by my unfinished question.
“What kind of life she and I lead, how we got here … that’s another long story.”
He grinned and wiped the corners of his mouth.
“I’ll give you three guesses, and I’ll tell you which one is closest.”
His smile seemed more definite than usual. I felt my own lips curving as well.
“Okay, how about this? You’re at the end of a tragic love affair.”
“So you’re really going to play? Fine. You’ve got two left.”
“The two of you killed someone precious to you.”
“And the last?”
“You’ve used up your will to live. You committed some kind of crime and were persecuted by people, by society.”
He slowly drank his tea.
“Perhaps all of them hit on part of the truth. But one thing’s certain. This is the last refuge for both of us.”
I gazed around the room once more. It was getting warmer.
“By the way, your face is looking good,” he continued, turning a mirror towards me.
I saw my face, still glowing with cold from outside. My eyes were large, my chin tucked in, my cheeks slightly hollow.
“It’s still new, but it already belongs to you. It’s bonded to your own muscles and it looks truly yours. You’ve passed through something, am I right? I don’t know if it was good or bad, but it shows in your face. I can tell because I’m a professional. It’s better than it was before.”
“No, that’s not right. There’s nothing admirable about what I’ve done.”
My inner clock told me it was time to go. My body seemed to want to sit there forever, and I tried to make myself get up but couldn’t. Just after midday I was due to meet Ito from JL.
“It’s almost time for you to leave, isn’t it?” The doctor stood. “I can always tell, even without people looking at the clock.”
He gave another proper smile.
“Not because I’m a plastic surgeon, though. It’s because I can often read what other people are thinking, what’s bothering them. When I was a kid, my parents fought all the time. I’d get between them when it looked like they were about to start, and I grew up always conscious of their moods. It’s funny that as an adult it seems to be a useful skill in life, one of my good points.”
The doctor opened the door and I went into the corridor. He came after me.
“One last thing, though,” he said softly. “If you’ve stumbled into a problem that can’t be solved by humans, if you’ve taken someone’s life … Overseas they have this concept of God.”
The hallway was much colder than the room had been.
“People who believe in God, when they’re suffering because they’ve killed someone, as long as they feel properly repentant, they can commend it to him. Thinking they can’t be forgiven, that’s just their own pride, because the only being in the universe with the power to absolve sin is God. Only God, far superior to humans, is able to forgive.”
I said nothing.
“In some places in Africa, when young people who were abducted as children by guerrillas or revolutionaries and forced to fight as soldiers returned to their villages, they hold this ceremony. They tell them that if they go through this ritual, if they cross this line, they will be cleansed of the guilt that torments them, the guilt of murder. In fact, lots of young people have been saved that way.”
He stood next to me as he spoke, studying my expression.
“Murder is beyond human judgment. For that, you have to turn to a concept greater than us.”
I hesitated for a moment, then walked away. He followed me without a word. At the entrance I stopped to put on my shoes.
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” I said. “We could seek redemption like that. Every killing is different.”
I turned to face him again.
“But holding on to it, leaving it unresolved, I think that’s right for me. I think I want to carry that perpetual burden, the knowledge that I’ve harmed others, I want to carry it for my whole life. I’m sure that’s best for me.”
He smiled serenely.
“That’s why I like you, because you say things like that.”
I GOT OUT of the cab, walked along a narrow street lined with rundown apartments and turned a corner past some shuttered-up shops. Opposite a prefab with a rusty traffic accident prevention sign on the wall was an empty factory. I stepped over the useless, twisted fence, and there was Ito. He was wearing the same gray beanie with a lightweight black coat and expensive denim jeans, sitting on a heap of scrap metal. When he noticed I was there he glanced at me briefly. Beside him lay a large backpack. For some reason I got a feeling of déjà vu.
“Are you sure you weren’t followed?”
“I changed cabs, then walked the rest of the way. It’s fine, I think.”
On the ground, the puddles had largely dried up.
“The guy they were hunting is dead. Of the two who were on the run, he was closest to me. Did you know that?”
“It was on the news.”
Ito was playing with the strap on his left wrist with his right hand. His cheeks twitched as though he was grinding his molars. Even when I lit a cigarette, he didn’t look at me.
“The bastard’s dead. All they said was that the body was found on the street, but it sounds like he jumped off a building. Still wearing his backpack with the evidence linking him to me in it. Stupid prick. Guys like that, they can dish it out but they can’t take it when it looks like it’s going to come back on them. They’ll probably catch the other one soon too. JL will be finished.”
He let go of his wristband, as though he’d finally run out of energ
y. His silver earrings glinted in the sun.
“Have you got the money?”
“Before that … have you really never killed anyone?”
Ito drew his brows together.
“Not yet. But don’t get the idea it’s because I’m chicken.”
His eyes were slightly sunken and he looked thinner than before.
“It’s just that it was too soon. That’s why this has happened. We should have done the killing all at once, after we’d grown much bigger. Pull off one trick after another to cause the maximum confusion, and then do it all in one fell swoop. When they were told that what the prank they pulled with the TV commentator was lame, they just went crazy. Because they got such a big reaction from the media, they got an inflated idea of their own importance. Dickheads. What we were trying to do wasn’t just about our own egos.”
“But still, you should forget about killing.”
Ito laughed derisively.
“What’s with the preaching? Go fuck yourself.”
“I’m Fumihiro Kuki.”
“Huh?”
The sun was gradually sinking lower in the sky. A breeze touched my bare cheeks. Next to the scrap metal was a rusted steel drum. A few grains of sand, carried by the wind, hit the side of the drum with a faint noise. He was staring at me.
“I’m a cancer, same as you,” I continued. “I changed my appearance. I murdered my father before he could finish my education, so I’m incomplete. Your first instinct was right.”
He kept looking at me.
“When you kill someone, it leaves a feeling that you’ll never be able to wash off. It stays inside you forever. It continues to affect your judgment and thinking. It narrows down your life significantly. You don’t have to put yourself through that.”
He didn’t move, but he was still watching me. I remembered what we’d talked about before.
“What are you living for? I guess everyone has different reasons, but for me, it’s because I’ve got memories that I don’t want to lose. I don’t know about you, but you never know, do you, what’s going to happen in the future? You can’t tell whether your life has been happy or unhappy until you’re at death’s door, through sickness or old age or whatever. There must be some warmth in everyone’s life, in the long vector lines that stretch from the past to the future. The fact that you were thinking about killing in the first place, doesn’t that prove that you’re interested in other people? Because without other people you can’t put your own thoughts and ideas into practice. Besides …”
I breathed in quietly.
“There are things that only people like us can do, that only people like us can think of. Right? Maybe I’m saying this to you because it’s still hard for me to say it to myself—no one has to disappear. It’s not necessary. If you can change yourself, it’s okay to do it a little at a time. And if you don’t want to change, then you don’t have to. It doesn’t matter if you’re a useful member of society or any of that crap. You don’t have to tell everyone what you’re thinking, you can just quietly let your acquaintances know, if you like. Or you can just keep your thoughts inside your head. You can think calmly, can’t you, without becoming desperate? You can brood about things, can’t you? If happiness is a fortress, then it doesn’t matter what you do. People who’ve got happiness to spare can give others a hand.”
The sun had almost set.
“That’s what I think at the moment, anyway. It’s just because my life has been like this that I’m determined to survive. And why shouldn’t I enjoy what the world has to offer until I grow old and die?”
Ito looked away, staring at a patch of dirt. The slanting sunlight cast long shadows.
“You sure do talk a lot.”
“Because with you, it’s like I’m talking to myself.”
Ito may have been exhausted, but he still seemed able to dress with care. Deliberately, he took off his beanie and tossed it to me. The breeze ruffled his medium length hair.
“I’ll leave this with you until next time we meet. In return for your long speech. Until then, I won’t do anything.”
I held his hat in my right hand.
“Next time I’m planning something, I’ll ask your opinion, because we’re both cancers. And I’ll pay you back the money some time too. I want to be even with you.”
I passed him a paper bag full of cash and a page torn from a notebook.
“I’m leaving the country for a while. Use this email address to contact me. And if you need to change your face, I know a good plastic surgeon.”
Ito put the money in his backpack, the paper in his pocket, and got to his feet. He started to walk off, then turned back and hesitated.
“I really never imagined I’d meet you like this.”
“Me neither.”
“Funny, eh.”
With that he walked slowly away. I stayed where I was and lit a cigarette. The wind was growing stronger.
It would have been easier to catch a cab if I went in the same direction as Ito, but I headed the other way instead. I walked towards a main road, through the puddles drying on the pavement. In a small park a little girl was tearing around merrily, her mother watching and laughing. The child was running as hard as she could, but then stopped abruptly as though she’d found something. She pushed her face close to whatever it was she had discovered, studying it with a big smile.
I couldn’t see what it was, a flower or an insect, but that instant of the child’s rapt attention seemed to hold some special meaning. Though her intellect and reason were still unformed, her eye was drawn to things around her with friendly interest, as though they were drawing her in. Perhaps Kaori would have a baby one day too. That was up to her, of course, but maybe she would. Idly I imagined what her child would be like when it grew up. It would be nice if the world was a bit easier to live in then than it was now. I wasn’t sure if I really hoped that but at any rate, when the idea popped into my head, I couldn’t reject it out of hand.
The sun had almost disappeared below the horizon. Once again, the light began to give everything an orange hue.
YAEKO AND SAE Suzuki’s graves were in a cemetery on a small hill on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Their headstones stood in the clear air and stillness. As I placed my flowers in front of them, I noticed that the ones already there were still fresh. I decided to give them some water. The detective, who had accompanied me, gave me a hand.
“You’re not directly related to them, you know,” he said quietly.
“I know, but I still thought I should come.”
I lit a stick of incense with my cigarette lighter and then stood, looking at the graves in front of me. Silently I informed them that Koichi Shintani was dead too.
• • •
WE RETURNED TO the car without speaking, and the private investigator drove. The road to Narita Airport was fairly quiet, so we were soon on the expressway. A commercial was playing on the radio.
“But still,” he said, hands resting on the steering wheel, “I think you did really well. For example, that JL guy who was on the run, I hear he was spotted near Ms. Kaori’s condo. Maybe he was waiting for her to come home or planning to break in. You were wise to send her to Konishi’s place.”
I started to answer, then stopped, looking out the window. Below the expressway I could see acres and acres of sleeping houses.
“Takayuki Yajima too,” he continued. “I think you had no choice but to do that. Of course, that’s assuming you put more value on Ms. Kaori than on society’s opinion. Even if you’d turned him in for drugs, as a first offender he’d have got probation, not jail time. And if you reported him for fraud it would have been difficult to prove, because the victims are usually reluctant to come forward. He was a textbook example of a marriage fraudster, because even if he was exposed, he could still put on a real performance and ingratiate himself with the ladies. Romantic attraction is a powerful thing, and he was very adept at using it. Plus he used drugs. When I was talking to his v
ictims, I was often surprised that almost all of them still can’t forget about him, even though they know he lied to them. They’d all gone through a stage where they wouldn’t listen to anyone’s advice. Even though they’d been reluctant to do drugs at first, eventually they became dependent, so they were ashamed and couldn’t accept help from others. Drug addiction’s a nasty business.”
I stared off into the distance.
“And he was persistent. He never gave up, no matter what obstacles were placed in his way. Even if you’d asked the police to protect Ms. Kaori, it would have been difficult for them to do much. He wasn’t stalking her, and basically the police can only act after a crime has been committed. There’ve been lots of women who’ve reported their stalkers to the police and still been murdered. To keep Ms. Kaori completely safe, dealing with him as you did doesn’t seem unreasonable.”
We drove straight as an arrow along the empty highway.
“That’s if you care about what society calls ‘morality.’ Practically, if you consider how dangerous he was, the fact that you didn’t stand to benefit personally, the peculiarity and urgency of the situation, you’d probably get about five years in prison for his murder. Mikihiko Kuki, well, that was his own choice. And as for that earlier event, you can’t be charged with anything, because offenses committed by minors aren’t treated as crimes.”
I wanted to look at him, but just kept staring at the road spreading out before me. At his mention of that “earlier event” an image of my father’s scrawny frame came back to me. I still didn’t know what I should have done. Even if I could have gone back in time to do it over, I’d probably have done the same. But that didn’t mean it could be forgiven, that I could forget about it, that it was a simple matter of black and white. Whatever the reason, I’d never forgotten the feelings I had when I did it, and I had a responsibility to hold on to them. I pretended to shrug off what he’d said about my father and talked about Yajima instead.